{"id":14506,"date":"2021-01-09T19:29:40","date_gmt":"2021-01-10T00:29:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=14506"},"modified":"2021-02-14T11:43:16","modified_gmt":"2021-02-14T16:43:16","slug":"14506","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2021\/01\/09\/14506\/","title":{"rendered":"Adrian Johnston 2019 Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

New Books in French Studies<\/a> Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism. The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy Volume 1 . <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are religious where we believe ourselves to be secular and secular where we believe ourselves religions. View of nature is religious, monotheistic, renamed God, Nature. Nature is omniscient, omnipotent, all-controlling. Atheistic materialists talk about nature is a re-named version of God of traditional montheism. Economy, the way we treat the economy is religious, the economy is God. When you look at religion, it becomes this-world sectarian identity politics. Religion has become an emblem, cultural identitarianism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lacan<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Lacanian materialism: atheism doesn’t necessarily imply materialism. Materialism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for atheism. History of materialist thought 18th C. French materialists, Dolbach, Diderot, what you see is atheism involves insisting it is nature not God, that is responsible for reality. They move from God to nature, reassign attributes formerly of God, now attribute to nature. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A subsequent step is required, moving from Strong Nature (Old God) and showing that nature is itself not unified totality, harmonious whole, guarantor, de-theologizing nature. It is a fragmented multitude, the don’t all stand together in a grand scheme. Negation of the negation: negate God, then negate the god-like nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Human nature: core of who and what we are, ultimately determined and rests upon a bedrock a natural foundation, evolution, genetics, DNA, ultimately is determinative of who and what we are. Something fixed, firm, immutable, unalterable core, part of us from birth. Neuro-plasticity, this picture is scientifically speaking, untenable. The configuration of our central nervous system, the brain is pre-programmed to be re-programmed. We are by nature inclined by the dominance of nurture over nature. Within biology itself, we have a natural scientific discipline, biology alone is insufficient for who and what we are. This is coming from within the natural sciences themselves. Within the life sciences and intra-scientific immanent critique. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rapprochement between Lacanianism meta-psychological framework and resources offered by neuro-sciences. Pre-history 1, human history prior to language and recorded history. Pre-history 2, natural history, long pre-dates human history. Lacan during 1950s, whatever is beyond language, we can know nothing. Ontogenetic level, our life-history, prior to language, is unknowable. Phylogenetic level, natural history prior to history of human species, before appearance of human, we cannot say anything. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Daniel Lord Smail’s deep history<\/a>. Pushes back against approaches to human history, that only starts talking about history when we have recorded history. Deep history, human history goes much further back than when we mark the beginnings of recorded history. The biblical sense of history, is disguised as secular mode of history. We continue to be religious even though we think we are operating in secular fashion. Well one fine day exnihilo language appeared and history began. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alain Badiou<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Badiou’s recourse to Plato. What we need to do is develop a combo of Plato and materialism. Plato is a proto-commie. Johnston is an Aristotle guy more than Plato. Johnston is unconvinced. Badiou’s topic of Nature in Being and Event. The version of nature he denies there are no fundamental unities, Being is just a series of proliferating multiplicities without end. One-less ontology. Banishing the One. Exorcising the spectres of Nature as unity and totality, Johnston likes this part. But disagrees when Badiou says even though Nature is not One-All, it is a domain of lawful regularity, Nature is set of structure and dynamics, consistent, a predictable, business as usual. A vision of Nature as eternally re-occurring order, lawful regularity. For Johnston, nature is a lot less lawful, and contains internal differentiations within itself, various levels of emergence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Democratic Materialism: complicit with late capitalism. A set of ideologies that are pervasive, relativism, culturalism, social constructivism, human reality is this diverse array of different linguistic and cultural universes, different fields of meaning, sometimes compatible, sometimes incompatible, diversity, no possibility for anyone to appeal to Truth, Universal, Eternal. Everything is relative, a matter of context etc. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Materialist Dialectics: How to develop a materialism that allows you to account for things associated with Truth, Universality, eternity, infinity. How to account for history immanent genesis, once they arrive in history, cease to be localizable within context. The foundations of arithmetic and geometry, those foundation laid in ancient Greek world, in a specific historical context, even though we can trace the origins to specific time and place, can’t just be reduced to origins, but trans-historical, eternal validity. This happens in various domains in human history, once it comes on the scene, can’t just be treated as fleeting historical thing among others. It becomes Universal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neuroscience, Badiou compares it to phrenology. Map 1-1 correspondences between brain and humans features. Epigenetics and neuroplasticity. Kluge model of the brain, contraption held together, improvised, haphazard. Brain is product of haphazard evolutionary history, components and sub-components slapped together as result of contingent evolutionary history. Awkward components that don’t work well together. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quentin Meillassoux<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Existence of earth before humans. Challenging a long standing dominant tendency in continental philosophy back to Kant. You have this line of orientation philosophically, anything knowable, that can count as existing for us humans is dependent on our subjectivity. The scope of our knowledge is mediated by our subjectivity. All knowledge, what counts for us as reality is dependent on us. This is idealism. You can problematise this, what about fossils. They long predate rise of homo sapiens and even sentient beings with conscious awareness. Basically you get answers as awkward and implausible from idealists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meillassoux relies on Hume’s problem of induction. Human purports to show causal analysis, seeks to demonstrate, we are never entitled to say a given pattern we see as cause-effect is an eternal natural law, inviolable cause-effect structure. Hume points out human beings are never able to test for the eternal validity of our hypotheses of laws of causality. Can only say highly probably, but can never say absolutely certain. We can never be sure we have direct insight into minded dependent causality. Meillassoux takes this Hume and transubstantiates ignorance into insight. Hume takes this as epistemological matter, instead treat it as insight into a real absence of causal necessity in nature and reality itself. There are NO eternally valid causal laws, for Meillassoux, this leads to HYPER CHAOS. any moment what we take to be laws of nature could be different. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Newtonian universe to post-Newtonian. For some unknown reason, nature at turn of century, shifted from being a Newtonian to post-Newtonian universe. this is disastrous for scientific thinking. Instead of scientists based on anomalies of scientific paradigm, and changing the via description and theoretical labour a shift to a new post-Newtonian paradigm Meillassoux according to Johnston, would hold that the universe and nature somehow changed in the early 20th Century. Hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Badiou: Joint shared fidelity to legacy of radical leftism. Badiou is lead by his fundamental philosophical framework and sidelines 3 dimensions central to Johnston’s approach: marginalizes biology, and life sciences, Badiou is a communist but not a Marxist, economics and politics involving the state are central references, but economy and the state, but Badiou disregards economy and the state. For Johnston, the most valuable elements are Marx’s philosophical anthropology is all important, and with Slavoj \u017di\u017eek totally disagree with Badiou, the centrality of the economy to our entire sociopolitical existence must be taken into account. Johnston also considers the state a central focus of struggle. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New Books in French Studies Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism. The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy Volume 1 . We are religious where we believe ourselves to be secular and secular where we believe ourselves religions. View of nature is religious, monotheistic, renamed God, Nature. Nature is omniscient, omnipotent, all-controlling. Atheistic materialists talk about nature … Continue reading “Adrian Johnston 2019 Interview”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lacan","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14506","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=14506"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14514,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14506\/revisions\/14514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}