In short, my immanent critique consists in pitting \u017di\u017eek\u2019s dialectical\/transcendental materialism against his glosses on quantum physics.<\/p>\n
In terms of a contemporary materialist interfacing with the natural sciences, I favor biology generally and neurobiology particularly for several reasons. <\/p>\n
To begin with, both for Hegelian philosophy (as manifested in the transition from its Philosophy of Nature<\/em> to its Philosophy of Mind<\/em>) and for various other philosophical and non-philosophical outlooks, human (like-) mindedness arises out of specifically organic nature qua regions of animal organisms. The life sciences, including evolutionary theory and (epi)genetics, provide the natural scientific explanations for these material bases of Geist, explanations that remain for the foreseeable future incapable of being replaced by impossibly cumbersome descriptions of numerically astronomical aggregates of quantum states (and, even if such substitution were possible, it might very well be undesirable in failing anyway to capture many of the salient dimensions and kinetics of living beings).<\/p>\n So, if what one wants is a materialist and (quasi-)naturalist theory of strongly-emergent subjectivity endowed with powers of (in the parlance of Analytic philosophy of mind) \u201cdownward causation\u201d vis-\u00e0-vis its material\/natural grounds\u2014this is a shared desideratum between \u017di\u017eek and me\u2014then biology, especially that of the human central nervous system, is far more crucial than quantum physics to this end.<\/p>\n Furthermore, if one is working at the intersection of the ongoing conflicts around both the mind-body and freedom-determinism controversies, as \u017di\u017eek and I are, then the philosophical struggle for (dialectical\/transcendental) materialism today cannot ignore the fact that most philosophers and theorists arguing about materialism in the context of these controversies understandably pay greater amounts of attention to the life sciences by comparison with physics.<\/p>\n In terms of the established terrain of our contemporary situation\u2014biology and its branches have this importance not only within philosophy, but also much more widely in terms of the infrastructural and superstructural layers of today\u2019s globalized, late-capitalist societies\u2014the life sciences are key sites of struggles for militant materialists nowadays both within and beyond the walls of academia.<\/p>\n Incidentally, I currently am writing a series of responses to Less Than Nothing<\/em> that will come together to form a single, lengthy engagement with this hulking tome. As you might imagine, part of me wishes \u017di\u017eek had written this book before I wrote \u017di\u017eek\u2019s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity<\/em> (written between 2002 and 2005 and eventually published in 2008). So, I have taken the opportunities presented by a number of recent requests for essays on \u017di\u017eek to put together this longer reply to what most captured my interest in Less Than Nothing<\/em>. I am toying with the idea of making it into a book unto itself.<\/p>\n Graham \u2013 Many continental philosophers dabble in psychoanalysis, but your own relation to the field is unusually far-reaching. Please tell us something about your psychoanalytic background and how it shapes your philosophical work. Particularly at the levels of epistemology, ontology, philosophical anthropology, and a theory of subjectivity, the Freudian revolution has major implications that the past century of Continental philosophy has been better about spending time digesting than the Analytic tradition\u2014although much still remains to be done in this regard.<\/p>\n My own transcendental materialism is conditioned and made possible by psychoanalysis, to which it is profoundly indebted for its very vision of who and what we are. In addition to the unconscious, analysis also adds to my philosophical outlook its unique fashions of conceptualizing the more emotional and motivational facets of human beings often under-theorized in the philosophical tradition (through its accounts of affects, drives, and libidinal economies).<\/p>\n What is more, clinical\/practical analytic experience in particular helped temper my occupational tendency as a philosopher to seek the quickest routes from, as it were, particularity to universality.<\/p>\n While at Emory, I had a psycho-diagnostics tutor who I repeatedly made grimace with my habitual philosopher\u2019s attempts to identify underlying generalities perhaps extractable from specific bits of therapeutic case material under discussion. She was great at showing me why and how this functioned effectively as an impediment to me appreciating the nature of the theory-practice dynamic in action. Apropos my philosophical engagements with both psychoanalysis and the sciences, I would like to believe that such analytic experiences have better sensitized me to need for philosophy to acknowledge, respect, and do justice to the extra-philosophical peculiarities and uniquenesses of more empirically oriented fields.<\/p>\n Graham \u2013 Despite your obvious admiration for Freud, it would be more accurate to call you a Lacanian. What does we get from Lacan that we cannot get from Freud?<\/p>\n Adrian \u2013 In my view, Marx and Freud, along with Kant and Hegel, are the unrivaled towering giants of the history of ideas from mid-modernity to the present.<\/p>\n All four, in addition to a number of others (such as Fichte, Schelling, Engels, Lenin, Lacan, Laplanche, Badiou, \u017di\u017eek, and Malabou), are crucial sources of insight and inspiration for me.<\/p>\n However, whereas most of these figures themselves engage directly and in detail with the history of philosophy in their own work, Freud is famously allergic to such engagements.<\/p>\n Partly due to Freud\u2019s justified disdain for quackery in German-speaking medical circles inspired especially by Schellingian Naturphilosophie<\/em> \u2014 his negative regard for philosophy \u00fcberhaupt<\/em> is very much contextually determined by his (mis)perceptions of German idealism and its consequences\u2014 Freud carefully resists getting drawn into explicit, lengthy conversations with the Western philosophical tradition. Of course, Freud\u2019s ideas regarding scientificity and anxieties about the wider public standing of analysis also shape his avoidance of philosophy and philosophers.<\/p>\n Now, I take Lacan at his word when he tirelessly insists that he is a die-hard, orthodox Freudian. From the period of Lacan\u2019s \u201creturn to Freud\u201d until his death, his teachings indeed should be interpreted as, most fundamentally, explorations of Freud\u2019s texts, concepts, practices, and legacy. Even when Lacan speaks and writes in his own technical parlance (i.e., Lacanese), his discourse never is without intimate relations to le champ freudien. The best rule of thumb for deciphering Lacan when one finds him to be opaque and impenetrable is to begin by asking, \u201cHow might this be connected to specific points in Freud\u2019s oeuvre<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n As is common knowledge, Lacan, unlike Freud, does not shy away from drawing upon his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries. Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel are referred to by Lacan almost as often as Freud himself. Lacan\u2019s intellectual itinerary reflects a continuously maintained set of ongoing exchanges with contemporaneous twentieth-century developments in philosophy, including phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics, feminism, and deconstruction (not to mention his periodic remarks on various Analytic figures from Russell to Kripke).<\/p>\n Although Lacan\u2019s injections of copious quantities of philosophical references and terminology into Freudianism may appear to violate both Freud\u2019s letter and spirit, I would contend, with Lacan, that such is not the case. In fact, Freud\u2019s corpus is in and of itself philosophically very rich and sophisticated, with Lacan thus merely helping to raise Freud to the dignity of the latter\u2019s own Notion (to phrase this in a Hegelian fashion).<\/p>\n Lacan not only is amazingly adept at bringing out the philosophical nuances and subtleties already harbored within Freud\u2019s works\u2014 he also is peerless in the extent to which he creatively extracts numerous further philosophical implications, strikingly novel and significant ones, from close considerations of Freud.<\/p>\n None of the above is meant to imply or assert that Freudian and\/or Lacanian analysis can and should be reduced to philosophy per se.<\/p>\n There indeed are many non-negligible differences between psychoanalysis and philosophy. However, as someone invested in both fields, I find Lacan utterly invaluable for a careful, satisfying philosophical assessment of Freud\u2019s discoveries.<\/p>\n I would go so far as to say that nobody else in the analytic field comes remotely close to Lacan in terms of putting Freudian psychoanalysis into productive dialogue with philosophy past and present. As someone deeply committed to sustaining this dialogue, this is the most important thing (although not the only one) I get from Lacan\u2019s teachings.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In short, my immanent critique consists in pitting \u017di\u017eek\u2019s dialectical\/transcendental materialism against his glosses on quantum physics. In terms of a contemporary materialist interfacing with the natural sciences, I favor biology generally and neurobiology particularly for several reasons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dia-mat","category-subjectivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12862"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12865,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12862\/revisions\/12865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nPsychoanalysis informs my philosophical labors in a number of manners. I consider Freud\u2019s discovery of the unconscious to be a Badiouian-style seismic Event-with-a-capital-E that philosophers ignore to the detriment of their own reflections.<\/p>\n