{"id":9615,"date":"2012-10-24T10:22:57","date_gmt":"2012-10-24T15:22:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9615"},"modified":"2021-07-23T09:56:28","modified_gmt":"2021-07-23T13:56:28","slug":"substance-is-subject-johnston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/10\/24\/substance-is-subject-johnston\/","title":{"rendered":"substance is subject johnston"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/johnstonAdrianZizekHegel.pdf\">Johnston Review of Zizek&#8217;s Parallax View<\/a> <em> diacritics<\/em> Spring 2007, 37.1: 3\u201320<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><span style=\"color: green; font-weight: bold; font-size: 12pt;\">substance is subject<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><span style=\"color: red; font-weight: bold;\">material being, as incomplete and inconsistent, contains within itself the potentials for the creative genesis of modes of subjectivity exceeding this same ontological foundation<\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u017di\u017eek\u2019s dialectical materialism conversely but correlatively proclaims that subject is substance. \u017di\u017eek declares, \u201ca truly radical materialism is by definition nonreductionist: far from claiming that \u2018everything is matter,\u2019 it confers upon \u2018immaterial\u2019 phenomena a specific positive nonbeing\u201d [Pv168]. in fact, as can be seen clearly at this juncture, \u017di\u017eekian materialism is nonreductive in two distinct senses:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>first, it depicts <strong>material being<\/strong> as an autorupturing absence of cosmic-organic wholeness prone to produce immanently out of itself precisely those parallax-style splits supporting transontological, more-than-material subjectivities;<\/li><li>second, these thus-produced subjective structures acquire a being of their own in the form of a certain type of incarnate existence (examples of this special sort of dematerialized matter integral to the constitution of subjectivity include Schelling\u2019s \u201cbodily spirituality\u201dand the strange \u201cmateriality\u201d of the signifiers spoken of by Lacan)<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>\u017di\u017eek speculatively ponders whether \u201c<strong>the emergence of thought is the ultimate Event<\/strong>\u201d [Pv178].&nbsp; By \u201cEvent,\u201d he\u2019s alluding to Alain Badiou\u2019s notion of the evental as distinct from the ontological.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u017di\u017eek is suggesting that, <span style=\"color: blue; font-weight: bold;\">like the irruption of the Event out of being, the emergence of the mental (that is, \u201cthought\u201d), although arising from within the neuronal, nonetheless comes to break away from being determined by the electrochemical inner workings of the wrinkled matter of the central nervous system (and, connected with the brain, the evolutionary-genetic factors shaping the human body as a whole)<\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is to claim that the <span style=\"color: red; font-weight: bold;\">mental phenomena of thought achieve a relatively separate existence apart from the material corporeality serving as the thus-exceeded ontological underbelly of these same phenomena<\/span>. 9<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Consciousness is \u201cphenomenal\u201d in contrast to \u201creal\u201d brain processes, but therein lies the true (Hegelian) problem: not how to get from phenomenal experience to reality, but <span style=\"color: green; font-weight: bold;\">how and why phenomenal experience emerges\/explodes in the midst of \u201cblind\u201d\/wordless reality. There must be a non-All, a gap, a hole, in reality itself, filled in by phenomenal experience<\/span>. [Pv197]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In this vein, if one reasonably grants that the brain is, at a minimum, a necessary condition for the mind, one is prompted, as \u017di\u017eek\u2019s reflections indicate, to wonder<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><span style=\"color: #0000ff; font-weight: bold;\">what kind of matter can and does give rise to something that then, once arisen, seems to carve a chasm of inexplicable irreducibility between itself and its originary material ground\/source.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><span style=\"color: red; font-weight: bold;\">Phrased differently, if mind is, at least partially, an effect of brain, what is the ontological nature and status of a cause capable of causing such an effect (that is, an effect appearing to establish an unbridgeable divide between itself and its supposed prior cause)?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Johnston Review of Zizek&#8217;s Parallax View diacritics Spring 2007, 37.1: 3\u201320 substance is subject material being, as incomplete and inconsistent, contains within itself the potentials for the creative genesis of modes of subjectivity exceeding this same ontological foundation. \u017di\u017eek\u2019s dialectical materialism conversely but correlatively proclaims that subject is substance. \u017di\u017eek declares, \u201ca truly radical materialism &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/10\/24\/substance-is-subject-johnston\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;substance is subject johnston&#8221;<\/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":[100,142,15,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hegel","category-nightworld","category-subjectivity","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9615","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=9615"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15119,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9615\/revisions\/15119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}