Todd McGowan: Hegel, Contradiction and Embracing Alienation

Prof. Todd McGowan is a professor of English at the University of Vermont and Professor and Director of Film and Television Studies. He’s authored numerous books on Hegelian philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, existentialism and film studies, including Emancipation After Hegel, Capitalism and Desire, Enjoyment Right & Left and Embracing Alienation. He also hosts the superlative Why Theory podcast and co-organises the Lack conference. Prof. McGowan is in continuous dialogue with his fellow travellers Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, Adrian Johnston and others in contemporary Hegelian-Lacanian theory. In this episode, we discuss the Hegel renaissance, Hegelian contradiction, Dialetheism and Paraconsistent logic, ontology from Kant to Hegel, coupling Lacanian psychoanalysis and existentialism, universalism and alienation, Peter Rollins' Church of the Contradiction.
You can find more of Prof. McGowan's work at www.uvm.edu/ca...
RSam Podcast #47
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[@FortYeah]

Very interesting conversation, thank you! About a Hegelian perspective on quantum physics, Stéphane Lupasco (1900-1988), a French-Romanian philosopher, developed throughout his whole career a logic that could make sense of what happens at the quantum level. His book, Le Principe d'Antagonisme et la logique de l'énergie, among others, offers a convincing explanation of the contradictions that appear in quantum physics, which would be the result of a maximal antagonism - 50/50 - between potentiality and actualization. For Lupasco, consciousness itself is also the result of the same kind of contradiction that comes with agency, which leads too to the same maximal antagonism between potentiality and actualization. That is why Lupasco says that consciousness is analog to quantum mechanics but not a quatum phenomenon itself. In other words, Lupasco's work implies a logic of the included third where the T state (T for third) appears when the law of non-contradiction is violated and gives rise to different levels of reality. Looks like he was on something even though his work wasn't much acknowledged. Looking forward to read what Zizek will have to say on the subject!

[@RahulSam]

Cheers! Thanks for letting me know about Stéphane. A bit of Googling, and he sure looks interesting!

[@russellmason4722]

This was a great conversation. I particularly enjoyed the insights on contradiction, alienation and universalism. Thank you!

[@RahulSam]

Cheers! Thanks for taking the time to leave the kind comment. Appreciate it.

[@PhilBaumann]

Agree about Todd McGowan. He makes accessible works that not everyone has the centuries to deep dive into. He just had a four part lecture series on Lacan Seminar XI via Theory Underground. He’s a real treasure.

[@RahulSam]

He sure is a treasure! And yes, I was aware of those lectures with TU but couldn't attend. I hope to sometime in the future!

[@waymaking23]

This is so relatable to work I've been doing regarding paradox. Thank you for this! How can I have written my first thesis on Hegel and not have heard of Todd McGowan until today? Life is weird. So is time (Maybe the answer is: I wrote the thesis over ten years ago).

[@RahulSam]

It's so great to hear that you came across Todd McGowan from here! In fact, as a fan of your work, I’m honoured. So, thank you for the comment. On a related note, Todd’s book Emancipation After Hegel has a beautiful chapter on how love connects to this ontological contradiction of being.

[@waymaking23]

@@RahulSam wonderful, thank you! I will be reading that one first then❤

[@Parsons4Geist]

The Goat❤

[@RahulSam]

All time!

[@KevinChou0909]

Great, looking forward to seeing your podcast with Zizek, I am curious how he will respond to the difference between his project about quantum mechanics and AJ’s neurobiology.

[@RahulSam]

Cheers! Yes, I'm still in the middle of trying to organise it, and as you'd imagine, Žižek is a very busy person.

[@bogdanandone9022]

I like

[@totonow6955]

52:10 okay THIS is it! This is what I feel. 56:20 omg. And this too.

[@RahulSam]

Love it!

[@totonow6955]

​@@RahulSamJust so helpful RahulSam you are an excellent interviewer. I always get a lot from Todd McGowan but you brought out particularly helpful ideas for me.

[@Robert_McGarry_Poems]

Thinking again... Math based on first principle axiomatic logic can not be complete. Yet, the language built to prove this must then have also been inherently incomplete. Does that bring into question whether or not we can rely on that line of thinking? Or... is the fact that this newly built language, incomplete or not, was structured in such a way that it must, in fact, contain everything from math, sufficient enough to use the logic that did arise from it as contradictory proof of the original question? Is math still useful, knowing it's incomplete? Should that logic carry up to this next order of logic magnitude? Does logic work like math? Are they the same? Is... logic... incomplete? Can we even conceive of a structure, like Gödel's prime language, that could do the same thing for natural language? Does that question even make any sense to try formalizing? Maybe... I don't know. My thinking on this one is, wait for it, incomplete. 😊

[@geraldineobrienbolivia]

Glad you mentioned the autistic awareness. 😅

[@akbar-nr4kc]

hello sam what about chomsky idea of mysterianism did it fit with hegel contradicition

[@RahulSam]

I don't think they have any meaningful connection, mate.

[@Robert_McGarry_Poems]

38:12 "Hints at a possible completion..." My thoughts on this are that you can only complete the incomplete by removing the self embedding bias (which we can't do as selves). But Gödel tries to do, by inventing a language that he thought he knew contained the whole of our conception of math. This was just to prove that there are true statements that can not be proven. Turing takes it a step further and says that no matter how good simulations get, no matter how good we get at predicting things, nothing can be known before it happens. I feel like quantum mechanics in its modern form is a perfect example of this. We use large data and statistics to guess at an outcome rather than nailing down a truth. Because truth is something we made up to order things with... A higher order language will also inherently be its own form of incomplete. As Russell and Whitehead eventually discover. There is no way to be certain that you can actually remove the layers of bias that come along with our framing of what might be considered a higher order language. If our understanding of how logic works on a pure level is never complete, can we use that to actually build a higher order language that is still useful given we couldn't even prove if it was the necessary tool for answering the question in the first place? This has always brought me back to other minds and truth... What are they? Usefulness and culture just are. Language is an attempt to harness that. It lives in the shared spaces between people interacting together in society. Language is the material manifestation of ourselves in a superposition with whatever culture we have surface area with. Maybe the Republic is a crude exploration of these ideas. Not building a town around people, but people cultivating a culture in a place. Usefulness, however, has its own rules. Ideas are not the people who bring them into existence. My useful may not be yours. Cultures may focus on different things. This is the baseline for inventing the world. We are all human, but we can't rely on that alone. Behavioralism is useful for teaching and learning sciences. Spiritualism is useful for emotive stability. Both are necessary, both must exist in balance. The coin thought experiment. If we happen upon a coin that both of us have never seen before, and we do not pick it up. Maybe it's glued to the floor. What is the usefulness of asking what might be on the bottom, when the top is clearly visible for us to agree upon? But could it be silly and fun, is that useful? Inventing the world around us, and actualization are the eventual prizes for realizing that... "I know only that I know nothing." And moving forward from there. I agree, completion is a word that assumes some reference of knowledge that humans just can't obtain. A society, if one chooses to view it that way, is a higher order immersion. It's our larger ordered language, our quantum mechanics, our halting problem question. The usefulness is not in its truth. It just is.

[@RahulSam]

Well put. Let's discuss all of this on our catch-up, mate.

[@Robert_McGarry_Poems]

My second pass... I'm still struggling with a question surrounding ideas: incompleteness vs. Contradiction. I believe I have a grasp on incompleteness as a concept, but I'm struggling to see how that leads to competitive ideas about contradiction? Contradiction is a language based logic game... it's in the name contra... diction. This pre supposes a very rigid and prescriptive definitions based language, which really can't be the case with natural language. Or with built prescriptive languages as Gödel shows, also. And as of yet, university isn't free. So definitions can't be universal, won't be even if we did have free egalitarian education. How can any system ever be "complete" under these circumstances? Given, I might entirely be misinterpreting what he means by contradicting... Wouldn't it necessarily suppose that language could be complete, should be logically complete? The concept of rigid contradiction is itself incomplete. Making any argument about non contradiction almost like the bottom of the coin... post modern before that was a thing... so to speak. But, is it useful??? We can't define the universe. Which means we can never truly define what it's made of. We are inside of that... this internal experience can't be described with external incomplete personal to you language. There is no formal system of contradiction that can be built with prescriptive language as it can not itself be free of contradictions. Yet, we do it, and it works for things we find useful... I keep finding myself coming back to this concept... useful. Maybe that is the real philosophy. What does it mean to be useful?

[@Robert_McGarry_Poems]

I think too much and this is the only useful place to write it down.... 😅

[@TheDangerousMaybe]

🔥🔥🔥

[@Cyberphunkisms]

watch my defence of agamben video vs todd mcgowan

[@RahulSam]

Will do!

[@johncracker5217]

Mustache man called himself a Hegelian Man of Destiny like Napoleon. I believe that it’s disputed but I believe it. Might be in the table talks or something

[@muditha-Asanga-Hewage]

ඔයා ශ්‍රී ලංකාවේද? දැන් මොනවද කරන්නේ?කවද්ද ලංකාවෙන් ආවේ😮? Are you from sri lanka? When are you leave your(my)country? 😮

[@RahulSam]

Hey! Yes, born and raised in Sri Lanka 🇱🇰

[@muditha-Asanga-Hewage]

@@RahulSam good bro. I am interesting to read tod. He is most influenced to my thinking. If you would like, try to introduce him to my country too. And i hope to translate his books to this country too.

[@RahulSam]

@@muditha-Asanga-Hewage Amazing! Will do, bro. I think some of his books have been translated, but I'm not sure about Sinhala/Tamil.

[@lbjvg]

Judith Butler exemplifies universality - she wants everyone to be treated humanely, to be allowed to live as the singularity that they are and takes up the cause of the most vulnerable - even at some personal cost eg Israel/Palestine.

[@RahulSam]

Interesting you say that, but I find Butler tends to reject universalism. I'm currently reading Contingency, Hegemony, Universality and maybe I'll have a better understanding of their thinking afterwards.

[@mudhen9295]

Meh. Her historicist interpretation of gender shuts out sexuality and reduces everything to a kind of lazy language monism.

[@johncracker5217]

Does Todd believe in natural selection? Has he ever read Heraclitus Or even Nietzsche? He sounds like a goddamn New England transcendentalist… lame

[@ludviglidstrom6924]

His philosophy is interesting, but his politics is really the worst of mainstream Western liberalism with all its imperialist implications for foreign policy and international relations. I can appreciate his universalist critique of identity politics and particularism, but it really falls flat on concrete issues which he really doesn’t understand.

[@avikchatterjee1945]

Hey this ain't something new. Check out the Reza Negarestani book Intelligence and Spirit. From Sequence Press. He sensed this idea well before lockdown. This book is a rip-off. That Negarestani book is a maverick, far superior.

[@noahwaiwaiole7888]

🎉🎉🎉good stuff! Constantly interrupted by subjective destitution. 😳🫨

[@RahulSam]

Cheers, man!