“Slavoj \u017di\u017eek\u2019s Hegelian Reformation: Giving a Hearing to The Parallax View (PV)”
\nAdrian Johnston
\ndiacritics \/ spring 2007
\n37.1: 3\u201320<\/p>\n
Apart from the task of denouncing falsifying popular pictures of Hegel, one of \u017di\u017eek\u2019s other driving ambitions in this book is the desire to formulate a fundamental ontology appropriate to the theory of subjectivity mapped out over the course of his entire intellectual itinerary (a theory informed by Kant and post-Kantian German idealism combined with Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology). And, herein, the articulation of such an ontology appropriately gets entangled, via reflections on the nature of the brain, with the latest instantiations of the perennial philosophical problem of the relationship between mind and body. \u017di\u017eek grants that the central nervous system is, in at least several undeniable and important senses, the material, corporeal ground of the subject, the bodily being without which there cannot be the parl\u00eatre (speaking being).<\/p>\n
whereas Kantian transcendental idealism treats the subjectively mediated structures (including various dichotomous splits found therein) which it analyzes as inexplicable givens, \u017di\u017eek\u2019s Hegel-inspired ontology purports to be able to get back behind these structures so as to explain their very emergence in the first place, both historically and materially. Before delving deeper into the essential features of \u017di\u017eek\u2019s Hegelian dialectical materialism, it should be asked: Why is exhuming the corpus of an allegedly materialist Hegel important, especially today? \u017di\u017eek depicts the current intellectual situation as one in which a false forced choice between either \u201cmechanical materialism\u201d (that is, a reductive approach in which material being is treated as nothing more than an aggregate of physical bodies bumping and grinding against each other) or \u201cidealist obscurantism\u201d (that is, a reaction against mechanical materialism that insists upon the existence of a sharp dehiscence between the physical and the metaphysical) is repeatedly presented in diverse forms of packaging [PV 4]. Despite cutting-edge work in the contemporary sciences appearing to vindicate after-the-fact the intuitions contained in the philosophies of nature elaborated by the early nineteenth-century German idealists, these sciences and the majority of those who claim to represent them have tended to turn a blind eye to the theoretical resources contained in the writings of, among others, Schelling and Hegel (this is unsurprising, given that twentieth-century Anglo-American Analytic philosophy arose, in part, as a reaction against nineteenth-century British Hegelianism). Throughout The Parallax View, \u017di\u017eek, departing from the work of others engaged with the natural sciences (especially cognitive neuroscience) who either gesture in the direction of or strive to develop more sophisticated materialist theoretical frameworks (such as Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, Joseph LeDoux, Catherine Malabou, Thomas Metzinger, and Francisco Varela), aims to show not only that today\u2019s sciences would be better able to express their insights if equipped with the concepts and terminology of a dialectical materialism formulated in dialogue with German idealism. \u017di\u017eek\u2019s thesis goes one step further: the natural sciences cannot even properly come to recognize and realize their true results if their fashions of self-understanding continue to remain mired in the ill-framed debates staged between, on the one hand, varieties of materialism whose notions of matter are no more sophisticated than seventeenth-century conceptions of \u201ccorporeal substance\u201d moved solely by the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Slavoj \u017di\u017eek\u2019s Hegelian Reformation: Giving a Hearing to The Parallax View (PV)” Adrian Johnston diacritics \/ spring 2007 37.1: 3\u201320 Apart from the task of denouncing falsifying popular pictures of Hegel, one of \u017di\u017eek\u2019s other driving ambitions in this book is the desire to formulate a fundamental ontology appropriate to the theory of subjectivity mapped … Continue reading “Johnston Adrian review of Parallax View”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,24,15,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hegel","category-lacan","category-subjectivity","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5322","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=5322"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8714,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5322\/revisions\/8714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}