ADRIAN JOHNSTON, INTERVIEWED
BY PETER GRATTON
Adrian Johnston is
one of the most widely followed philosophers writing today. Influenced
by Žižek and his readings of German idealism, Johnston’s work has gained
many readers among those making the materialist and realist turns in
Continental philosophy. A professor in the Department of Philosophy at the
University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member of the Emory
Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta, Johnston has been publishing at a
breathtaking pace: He is the author of Time
Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (2005), Žižek’s
Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (2008), Badiou,
Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (2009),
all from Northwestern University Press. This year he has published both Prolegomena
to Any Future Materialism, Volume One: The Outcome of Contemporary French
Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 2013) and is the co-author,
with Catherine Malabou, of Self
and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (Columbia
University Press, 2013). His next book, Adventures
in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers, will
be released by Edinburgh University Press in early 2014. Johnston’s books are
guided by his “transcendental materialism,” which in sum calls for a
materialist ontology that nevertheless does not reduce away the gap or figure that
is human subjectivity. Johnston argues for retooling Freud and Lacan after the
success of the natural sciences in recent decades, but argues that both Freud
and Lacan presaged a lot of these successes. Critical of the thinkers of
immanence whom he believes, following Hegel, can only give us subjectless
substance, Johnston’s work has brought Lacanianism into the 21st century when
many wrongly claimed it dead long before the end of the last.
Peter Gratton: Thanks for
taking the time to talk about your recent work. Why don’t we start with you
giving an overview of what you take to be stakes involved in your trilogy as it
is taking shape in the next couple of years?
Adrian Johnston: Thank you for
the opportunity of this interview. The single biggest stake of my trilogy Prolegomena
to Any Future Materialism is the establishment of the core components of
what I call “transcendental materialism.” This is a philosophical framework
attempting to combine a rigorously and thoroughly materialist qua anti-idealist
ontology (profoundly informed by the empirical, experimental natural sciences)
with a robust, non-reductive theory of subjectivity (as itself an autonomous
negativity à la Kantian and post-Kantian German idealism).
Although crucial aspects of
this framework have taken shape through engagements with recent and
contemporary figures (especially Žižek [as per my 2008 book Žižek’s
Ontology] as well as Lacan, Badiou, and Meillassoux [as per the just-published
first volume of the trilogy, The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy]),
the questions and issues it addresses are perennial ones for philosophy. More
precisely, transcendental materialism is bound up with, loosely speaking,
versions of the mind-body and freedom-determinism problems. Of course, as the
history of ideas (and history more generally) exhibits, the means by which
these perpetually recurring problems are handled have countless
interdisciplinary, cultural, ideological, and political ramifications and
echoes (about which I will say more later in this interview in response to some
of your other questions).
The first volume of Prolegomena
to Any Future Materialism unfolds through elaborating immanent critiques
of Lacan, Badiou, and Meillassoux in which each of these three is assessed
according to his own avowed materialist commitments and standards. This initial
volume thereby negatively leads via critique into the positive project of
constructing transcendental materialism as a system unto itself in the
subsequent second and third volumes of the trilogy (entitled A Weak Nature
Alone and Substance Also as Subject respectively). In
short, The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy—its title is a nod to
Engels’s 1888 Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German
Philosophy, with me putting forward transcendental materialism as, in certain
respects, a twenty-first-century extension of the historical/dialectical
materialism of Marx and Engels—clears an opening for my system-building efforts
in relation to select significant others who I readily acknowledge have shaped
this opening and influenced these efforts. Put in overtly Hegelian language,
transcendental materialism is preliminarily introduced as a sublation (als
Aufhebung) of what I allege to be the inconsistent, self-dialecticizing
materialisms of such thinkers as Lacan, Badiou, and Meillassoux. In particular,
I see the formalist and anti-naturalist tendencies of these three, with their
shared French neo-rationalist leanings, as at odds with true materialism proper
(given that the latter, as I argue, integrally must involve empirical,
scientific, and naturalist elements).
The second volume, A Weak
Nature Alone, lays down the ontological foundations of transcendental
materialism already with an eye to its theory of subjectivity (the topic of the
third volume). As its title indicates, the one-and-only fundamental being
posited by my strictly materialist ontology is that of a “weak nature.” This
phrase signals several things. To begin with, “nature” along the lines of the
naturalism of the natural sciences, as the factically given spatio-temporal
bodies and processes of the physical universe (or universes), is the lone,
zero-level baseless base of this ontology. Obviously, this entails a rejection
(ultimately on the grounds of Hegelian logic, in my case) of conceptions of
ontology constrained by permutations of “ontological difference” à la Heidegger,
with the ontic-ontological contrast being, by my estimation, insufficiently
dialectical/speculative. Furthermore, however, I argue, buttressed by empirical
as well as philosophical justifications, that the nature of a science-informed
naturalist ontology need not and, indeed, should not be envisaged (as do so
many advocates and denouncers alike of garden-variety scientisms and
naturalisms) as a massive totality or seamless whole in which each and every
entity and event is exhaustively determined by a foundational set of efficient
causes qua iron-clad, inviolable laws of necessary connection. This vision of nature
is epitomized by the familiar figure of Laplace’s Demon and could also be
labeled, in hybrid Lacanian-Badiouian locution, as the big Other of the One-All
of Nature-with-a-capital-N. Instead of such a freedom-prohibiting,
subject-squelching “strong” Nature—faithful to Lacan and Žižek here, I maintain
that this is yet another non-existent big Other—transcendental materialism
portrays nature as “weak” in the sense of it being a detotalized, disunified
non-One/not-All of distinct, heterogeneous levels and layers of beings shot
through with and riven by a thriving plethora of antagonisms, conflicts,
fissures, splits, and the like (as paradigmatically embodied by the
“kludge”-like central nervous system of human beings). These intra-natural
negativities short-circuit what otherwise would be the heteronomy-enforcing
determinism of a single, God-like Nature with its compulsory commandments. In a
related vein, I advance, as I believe is requisite for my purposes, arguments
against the reductivisms, eliminativisms, and epiphenomenalisms of
scientistic—I would go so far as to say “pseudo-scientific”—objections to
recognizing the real, efficacious actualities of a multitude of agencies and
constellations appearing to resist being collapsed down to the crude bump-and-grind
mechanisms of narrow (mis)construals of the natural (especially life) sciences.
To cut a long story short—the
second volume of the trilogy tells this story in detail—I depict the weakness
of nature (a phrase I trace back to Hegel himself, with his repeated employment
of the phrase “Ohnmacht der Natur”) as the root meta-transcendental necessary
condition for transcendental subjectivity itself. The latter is a second-order
subjective/more-than-objective matrix of possibility conditions immanently arising
out of weak nature as a first-order substantial/objective network of
possibility conditions. In other words, if nature was not this weak, instead
being (overwhelmingly) strong, then the self-determining spontaneity of
transcendental subjects could not genetically emerge in and through bottom-up
trajectories out of exclusively natural-material substances.
Moreover, A Weak Nature
Alone articulates this ontology through a historical narrative inspired by
both Žižek and, perhaps surprisingly, the 2002 book Tales of the Mighty
Dead by Pittsburgh Analytic neo-Hegelian Robert Brandom. Following Žižek’s
employment of Freudian-Lacanian Nachträglichkeit/après-coup, I perceive
transcendental materialism as a new development “creating its own past” in the
form of a history that explicitly comes into view only retroactively, after the
fact of the advent of this newness. Following the Brandom of Tales of the
Mighty Dead (these “historical essays in the metaphysics of
intentionality,” as per this book’s subtitle, recount the pre-history of
Brandom’s “inferentialism”), this retroactively revealed history is so eclectic
as to have gone unrecognized before, its connections between diverse thinkers
and moments widely distributed across different contexts and traditions previously
having been (at least partially) invisible. The motley crew of protagonists in A
Weak Nature Alone includes the Hegel principally of his undeservedly
neglected and maligned Naturphilosophie; the Engels of the “dialectics of
nature” (equally and with equal unfairness rubbished and ignored); the
Russian/Soviet partisans (Plekhanov, Lenin, Bukharin, et al) of science-engaged
Engelsian dialectical materialism (contra the anti-Engelsianism of
post-Lukácsian Western Marxisms running through both the Frankfurt School and
Althusserianism); the Lacan of a Lacanian neuro-psychoanalysis (foreshadowed in
my portions of Self and Emotional Life as well as already in Time
Driven [2005] and Žižek’s Ontology, too); and, Anglo-American
Analytic philosophy as represented primarily by John McDowell’s neo-Hegelianism
as well as the Stanford School of the philosophy of science (particularly Nancy
Cartwright and her “dappled world”).
The manuscript of A Weak
Nature Alone is nearing completion. I have just a few shorter portions of
it left to write, with outlines already composed for those remaining unwritten
segments. Nonetheless, due to a combination of personal and other professional
obligations, I probably will not be ready to turn over the finalized version of
it to Northwestern University Press until early 2014. This means, assuming
Northwestern U.P. does not reject it as unpublishable, that it will not see the
light of printed day until sometime around 2015. In the meantime, my Adventures
in Transcendental Materialism, forthcoming in 2014, covers closely related
terrain. As for the third and final volume of Prolegomena to Any Future
Materialism, Substance Also as Subject, I feel it fitting to discuss that
in response to your next question.
PG: As you trilogy has
been developing, I was wondering if there were particular sticking points you
didn’t see coming.
AJ: Whereas A Weak Nature
Alone deals with substance (i.e., weak nature) as the meta-transcendental
necessary condition of possibility for (transcendental) subjectivity, Substance
Also as Subject—obviously, the title of the third volume is taken from the
preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—deals with the transcendental
sufficient conditions of possibility for subjects. The “subject” is here the
irreducible, ineliminable ensemble of more-than-material structures and
dynamics (as reflexive and recursive) immanently transcending the material
grounds out of which this subject nonetheless emerges and without which it
would not exist at all in the first place. The second and third volumes of the
trilogy are divided between an ontology of meta-transcendental substance and a
theory of transcendental subjectivity respectively, with the former furnishing
the necessary conditions for the latter.
I have yet to get well and
truly underway with the writing of the third volume. Right now, Substance
Also as Subject consists of a collection of rough notes, lists of likely
relevant texts, and a few prototype drafts of sub-sections of what eventually
will be the book itself. To start directly responding to your question, some of
the “sticking points” are not actual present so much as potential future ones.
First of all, I still am toying around indecisively with competing plans for
how to organize the third volume. I currently am inclined toward a plan
according to which the book would be divided into two major halves, one focused
on phylogeny (i.e., the historical genesis of human socio-symbolic
configurations) and the other on ontogeny (i.e., the temporally elongated
movements of subject formation), with the halves each being divided into three
parts reflecting the three fields most important for transcendental materialism
as an interdisciplinary theoretical orientation: science, psychoanalysis, and
philosophy. However, restricting myself to the two dimensions of phylogeny and
ontogeny leaves out the third dimension of non/pre-human natural history.
Darwinian evolutionary theory is a hulking presence in the background of my
materialist position. But, I suspect it will be too much to try to tackle it
directly within the confines of the third volume as a single book. Moreover,
with Darwin’s long shadow falling over the biological resources I definitely
will be employing no matter what in any final version of Substance Also as
Subject, I am not too worried; numerous reverberations of the Darwin-event (to
misappropriate some Badiouian phrasing) inevitably will register themselves in
this work.
I will need to pause with
writing once I finish the second volume and immerse myself in a lot of
additional reading in preparation for the third volume. Certain “known
unknowns” and, in all likelihood, presently “unknown unknowns,” too (to use
some of the categories of Rumsfeld’s epistemology dear to Žižek’s wonderful
sense of humor), are sticking points insofar as these loci of my own ignorance
will slow me down by forcing me to delay launching into the composition
of Substance Also as Subject. I intend to concentrate my yet-to-be-done
preparatory research on additional literature in the natural sciences and
Analytic philosophy of mind (I already have done the bulk of the psychoanalytic
and Continental-philosophical reading crucial to my agenda in the third volume,
although I will be spending some time revisiting Simondon’s and Deleuze’s
corpuses). Functionalism and emergentism in philosophy of mind and cognitive
science will be of special concern to me in these preparations. I am confident
that the final third of the trilogy will be much better and more worthwhile for
me being patient and allowing myself the time to work through a wider range of
pertinent authors and texts. I already have put together the skeleton of the
theses of Substance Also as Subject, but I want this last installment of
the trilogy to have ample flesh on its bones. Hence, I anticipate that it will
not be until 2015 at the earliest that I will begin writing this book in
earnest.
Another sticking point for me,
appropriately enough, has to do with what philosopher of mind David Chalmers
famously dubbed “the hard problem.” To be more precise, I am unsure of whether
I can or should (and, if so, exactly how) attempt to grapple specifically with
so-called “qualia” (i.e., the phenomena of private, first-person sensory
experiences) as they figure in mind-body debates amongst Analytic philosophers.
I am tempted to continue hewing to the angle I have adopted to this thus far,
sidestepping the issue while remaining cautiously optimistic that the
perceptual components of experiences—in line with Kant, Hegel, and McDowell,
among others, I consider experience always to involve a complex admixture of
percepts and mediating concepts—sooner or later will receive satisfactory
bio-physical explanations. Previously, I have justified this sidestepping by
emphasizing that the subject at stake in my theory of subjectivity is, to stick
with the immediately preceding terms, inextricably intertwined with conceptual
mediation (rather than being anchored in perceptual [supposed] immediacy). With
reference to Lacan’s psychoanalytic distinction between ego (moi) and subject (sujet)
and his distinctive conception of the latter, the perception-consciousness
apparatus of the ego is not what preoccupies me, as it arguably does those
heavily invested in the squabbles about qualia. Or, put in yet other words, I
am more interested in the rapport of active conceptual sapience, instead of
passive perceptual sentience, with bio-physical bodies. For me, there is
another hard problem: the enigma of how material nature becomes self-sundering,
auto-disruptively giving rise to denaturalized “spiritual” (à la Hegelian Geist both
subjective and objective as well as both “I” and “We”) beings instantiating and
individuating themselves in and through virtual webs of socio-symbolic (quasi-)
materials. But, whether a solution to my hard problem depends on a prior
solution to Chalmers’s is a question I wish to give additional thought. Again,
I will need to reassess these issues after further reading and reflection.
PG: Of course, everyone
claims to be a materialist these days. How do you differentiate your work from
other dominant materialisms? For example, while it’s clear you think Badiou’s
formalism is one dead end for materialism, you also steer away from the “new
materialisms” of such people as Jane Bennett.
AJ: As your question
already suggests, nowadays the word “materialism” has been rendered almost
meaningless through absurd overuse. When formalist metaphysical realisms and
spiritualist theologies can and do pass themselves off as militant
“materialisms,” merely identifying oneself as a materialist becomes, by itself,
an uninformative gesture at best. I maintain that any materialism worthy of the
name must be, as the Lacan of the tenth seminar might phrase it, not without (pas
sans) its conditioning relationships with matter(s) as the spatio-temporal
forces and factors encountered precisely through the a posteriori observations
and experiments of Baconian modern scientific method and its post-Baconian
variants. The arguments supporting this multi-aspect stipulation, with its
greater stresses on the sciences and naturalism, entail disqualifying as
genuinely materialist many self-styled materialisms recent and contemporary,
particularly those of more rationalist or religious bents.
As you note, I contend that
Badiou’s a priori mathematical formalism is fundamentally
incompatible with his materialist commitments. This contention is spelled out
in the fourth chapter (“What Matter(s) in Ontology: The Hebb-Event and
Materialism Split from Within”) of The Outcome of Contemporary French
Philosophy. However, in response to your question, his now-familiar
distinction, from the preface to Logics of Worlds, between “democratic
materialism” (with its particularist “there are only bodies and languages”) and
the “materialist dialectic” (with its universalist addition “except that there
are also truths”) is relevant and insightful at this juncture (transcendental
materialism converges with key features of Badiou’s materialist dialectic as
per his 2006 masterpiece). I agree with the basic gist of this Badiouian
distinction, an agreement I clarify and qualify in A Weak Nature Alone.
Moreover, his broader point that the ancient conflict throughout the history of
philosophy between idealism and materialism (as per the traditional Marxist
narrative of Engels, Lenin, and Althusser, among many others) recently has
morphed into an intra-materialist antagonistic division is well illustrated by
exactly what motivates your very question. That is to say, the ongoing battle
for the title/term “materialism” is one of the overdetermined primary sites of
“struggle in theory” today.
Your mentions of Jane Bennett
and the various “new materialisms” are quite fitting and helpful in this
context. The twelfth and final chapter of my forthcoming Adventures in
Transcendental Materialism is devoted to articulating criticisms of
Bennett’s “vital materialism” (as per her 2010 book Vibrant Matter) and William
Connolly’s closely related “immanent naturalism” (as per his 2002 book Neuropolitics and
2011 book A World of Becoming). Due to the initial appearance of uncanny
proximity between immanent naturalism especially and transcendental materialism,
spelling out the differences separating these two positions that make for a
real difference between them as distinct stances proved to be an important and
productive exercise at the end of Adventures in Transcendental Materialism.
And, the first three chapters of Adventures in Transcendental Materialism set
up these later criticisms by revisiting Hegel’s Spinoza critique with an eye to
its still-enduring relevance. To be more specific, I view one of the main fault
line of current intra-materialist tensions to be that dividing neo-Hegelian
materialisms (such as those of myself and Žižek) from neo-Spinozist ones (such
as those of Bennett, Connolly, and many other “new materialists”). Basically,
reading the first of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” as an extension of one of
Hegel’s key complaints about Spinoza’s monism (and this whether Marx himself
was aware of the connection or not), I portray Bennettian vital materialism and
Connollian immanent naturalism as both being “contemplative” materialisms in the
sense problematized already in 1845 in Thesis One. Overall, the ongoing debates
concerning contemporary materialisms strike me as often echoing the conflicts
of the German-speaking intellectual world of the late-eighteenth and
early-nineteenth centuries—more precisely, the disputes concerning the
relations (or lack thereof) between consequently systematic philosophies and
philosophies of radical autonomy initially stirred up by Jacobi’s use (and
abuse) of Spinoza, with these disputes remaining thereafter central to the
development of Kantian and post-Kantian German idealism.
In addition to a German
philosophical background from Jacobi through Marx casting its long shadow over
today’s clashes and divergences between neo-Spinozist and neo-Hegelian materialisms,
a more recent French background far from unrelated to this older German one
also inflects the intra-materialist factionalizations of the early twenty-first
century. The neo-Spinozism of the majority of new materialists tends to be that
of Deleuze. Of course, Žižek, Badiou, and I, by contrast, rely broadly and
deeply on Lacan (for instance, Badiou appropriately depicts Lacan as
foreshadowing his own efforts to overcome the opposition between asubjective
“system” à la Althusser [a self-confessed neo-Spinozist] and
subjective “freedom” à la Sartre [an inheritor of a
Cartesian-Kantian-Hegelian line of thinking about subjectivity]). Obviously,
the reality and place of “the subject” is the big bone of contention between a
Spinoza-Deleuze axis and a Hegel-Lacan one.
Not only do I reject the
Althusserian/Deleuzian insistence on the inseparability of anti-humanism and
anti-subjectivism as based on an illegitimate equivocation between the
concept-terms “human being” and “subject”—for a number of reasons, I simply do
not think that the structures and phenomena characteristic of what is referred
to as “subjectivity” validly can be replaced by monochromatic monisms of
non-subjective entities and events all arrayed on a single, flat, uniform field
of being.
The causally efficacious real
abstractions of the structures and dynamics of subjects resist being conjured
away through quick and easy reductions, eliminations, fragmentations,
dissolutions, dehierarchizations, or deconstructions. For me, the true ultimate
test of any and every materialism is whether it can account in a strictly
materialist (yet non-reductive) fashion for those phenomena seemingly most
resistant to such an account. Merely dismissing these phenomena (first and
foremost, those associated with subjectivity) as epiphenomenal relative to a
sole ontological foundation (whether as Substance, Being, Otherness, Flesh,
Structure, System, Virtuality, Difference, or whatever else) fails this test
and creates many more problems than it supposedly solves. Such dismissals are
as similarly unsatisfying in my eyes as the contemplative outlooks of Feuerbach
and his eighteenth-century French materialist forerunners were in Marx’s.
PG: As you’ve noted one think
that you’re quite critical about in recent Continental philosophy is its
anti-naturalism, in particular its seeming allergy to discussing the empirical
findings of contemporary science. Why do you think that came about?
AJ: The hostility to
naturalism and the natural sciences dominating twentieth-century Continental
philosophy save for a handful of exceptions—this animus continues to skew the
perspectives of most self-professed Continentalists and their allies in the
theoretical humanities—unsurprisingly has a complex history behind it. As I see
it, its roots trace back to the final years of the Holy Roman Empire. In that
time and place, as the context giving rise to Continental philosophy itself as
springing primarily from the twin fountainheads of Kant and Hegel,
anti-Enlightenment Protestant Pietism becomes a powerful intellectual influence
(partly thanks to Jacobi who, well before Heidegger and his disciples, makes
the “nihilism” of rational disenchantment a central concern of European
philosophers). In particular, German Romanticism and the more Romantic sides of
German idealism (especially Hölderlin as well as Schelling at several of the
many phases of his Protean philosophical evolution) embrace a Pietism-tinged
spiritualist animosity to the Enlightenment’s secular rationality. Of course,
these late-eighteenth-century developments are continuations of the antagonism
between science and religion that immediately arises with the birth of the
former early in the seventeenth century with Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes.
Moreover, the Pietist-Romantic backlash against scientific-style Enlightenment
reason (and the atheistic consequences it threatens) comes to color the
subsequent two centuries of European philosophy; a line of scientific
naturalism’s enemies forms from Jacobi on through Schelling (particularly in
his later years), Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, and many others, including
these figures’ legions of contemporary followers (to this anti-Enlightenment
axis, I like to oppose the one I am allied to that includes Hegel, Marx,
Engels, Lenin, the later Lukács, Freud, Lacan, Badiou, and Žižek). Not only is
it no accident or coincidence that the recent so-called “post-secular turn”
initially arose within phenomenological circles—this turn is not even really
recent or original, with the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century
origins (i.e., Protestant Pietism and German Romanticism) of phenomenology,
existentialism, and their offshoots already having taken such a turn against
the secularism of the Enlightenment. As even the most unperceptive observer of
our current collective situation knows, we still are fighting on multiple
fronts variants of the now four-centuries-old science-versus-religion conflict
(however, in a larger historical perspective, four-hundred years is not that
long a stretch of time).
Furthermore, the “critical
theory” of twentieth-century Western Marxism partially dovetails with the
not-so-secular neo-Romanticism of the existentialists and phenomenologists. On
the European continent in the twentieth century, anti-naturalism/scientism
makes for some very strange bedfellows, implicitly uniting such adversaries as
Heidegger (with his warnings about the desacralizations of nihilistic
techno-scientific “enframing”) and Adorno-Horkheimer (with their similar
warnings about the dystopian nightmare of the “fully administered world” of
“instrumental reason”). The 1923 publication of the early Lukács’s History
and Class Consciousness opens up a rift between Eastern (i.e., Soviet) and
Western Marxisms, with Engels’s dialectical materialist engagements with the
natural sciences being a main point of divergence. In line with the Lenin of
1908’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, the Soviets stick to the project of
extending and enriching Engels’s “dialectics of nature,” whereas, starting with
the young Lukács, Western Marxists tend to repudiate Engelsian Naturdialektik,
preferring a narrower version of historical (rather than dialectical)
materialism whose social constructivist commitments justify an overriding
preoccupation with cultural analysis and ideology critique. This
anti-Engelsianism marks both the Frankfurt School and Athusserianism alike
despite their many other differences. Hence, in twentieth-century European
philosophy, hostility to naturalism and the natural sciences spans the full
political spectrum from the far Right to the radical Left, cutting across
otherwise opposed positions. In the second volume of Prolegomena to Any
Future Materialism, A Weak Nature Alone, I both tell this story about
Engels’s disputed legacy as well as seek to reactivate the abandoned Soviet
option of interfacing historical and dialectical materialisms with the sciences
of nature.
Of course, I would be the
first to concede that, when parties as far apart as Heideggerians and Adornians
end up tacitly agreeing with each other, there most likely is something really
there to which they all are responding. In this context, there indeed are
countless grave problems plaguing (post-) modern (post-)industrial societies as
themselves thoroughly dependent upon scientific knowledge and technological
know-how. Conservative neo-Romantics and revolutionary Marxists both are
similarly registering and diagnosing intertwined sets of cultural, economic,
political, psychical, and social symptoms (although, obviously, their
prescribed remedies, if and when proffered, differ dramatically). My fidelity
to an Enlightenment-rooted, science-informed atheistic materialism does not
uncritically disregard these problems/symptoms despite its contention that the
majority of twentieth-century Continental thinkers react to them with
misdiagnoses and misprescriptions (I will address the more ideological
dimensions of scientism in response to your next question below).
I continue to favor a somewhat
classical Marxist perspective on science and technology in two specific senses.
First, although I am no partisan of crude pseudo-Marxist economism (whether
that of the Second International or Stalin), I think that Marx’s historical materialist
critique of political economy is correct to emphasize that, particularly under
capitalism, economic forces and factors by and large usually exert more
socio-political influence than other aspects of social structures. In line with
this, I am certain that infrastructural rather than superstructural
determinants are the main drivers of science, technology, and their rapid,
steady evolutions and expansions within and across societies. In the words of
one of Marx’s criticisms of Hegel, looking for ultimate, final explanations of
(capitalist) techno-science/scientism in terms of cultures, philosophies,
spirits, worldviews, and the like amounts, when all is said and done, to the
vain effort to make history march on its head.
Second, Marx treats machinery
in particular (as it figures in processes of industrial mechanization) with
true dialectical finesse in ways directly relevant to any consideration of
science and technology in relation to larger social dimensions. Although
science and technology have been driven along by and become absolutely
indispensable to capitalist modernity and late-capitalist
post-modernity—admittedly, they thereby contribute greatly to innumerable
social ills and injustices—scientific savoir and technological savoir-faire are
not inherently by nature properties exclusively of capitalism. For Marx,
capitalism’s machines help make possible a post-capitalist socio-economic
future (as the Wagnerian Žižek would put it, the wound can be healed only by
the spear that smote it). These technical instruments and tools indeed
contribute to status quo misery both material and “spiritual.” But, these
deplorable negative effects do not emanate from any kinds of asocial,
independent essences of science and technology; they produce their consequences
and results in relation to the larger, enveloping socio-economic configurations
with which they are enmeshed. Marx anticipates that the machinery expropriated
by socialism from capitalism will have different infrastructural and
superstructural effects once unplugged from a capitalist social structure and
plugged into a socialist/communist one. Contra any sort of Romantic neo-Luddite
perspective—no thinker is less of a Romantic than Marx—one could say about the
machines of capitalist techno-science that the symptom is not the disease and
that the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater.
As is quite well known,
Continental science-phobic anti-naturalism also is of a piece with the general
Continental-Analytic divide sadly still shaping philosophy departments in the
English-speaking world in particular. In this intra-philosophical culture war,
one mirroring persistent wider frictions between “hard” and “soft” disciplines
(i.e., formal and natural sciences versus all other neither-mathematical-nor-scientific
fields), a taken-for-granted pact between the warring sides parcels out
territories of explanatory jurisdiction such that Analytics typically handle
the sciences.
Continentalists thus are left
the arts and humanities to pit with sneering resentment against Analytics after
this philosophical carve-up of the other disciplines outside philosophy. I see
no good reason to accept this division of interdisciplinary labor along the
established lines of the Continental-Analytic split. In fact, I am absolutely
convinced that resources furnished specifically by German idealism, Marxism,
and psychoanalysis (orientations considered to be provinces of Continental
philosophy) have enormous amounts of potential for philosophical reckonings
with the empirical, experimental sciences. I believe that much more can and
should be done in bridging the Continental-Analytic rift in relation to the
sciences than just importing cherry-picked bits of phenomenology into the
discourses of cognitive science and philosophy of mind, which accounts for a
lot of the bridge-work done thus far. Deleuzian engagements with the sciences,
another type of related bridge-work, too often seem to me to drown out
scientific details in the repetitive chanting of the boring old refrain hen
kai pan, turning the colorful, multifaceted resources of the sciences into
black cows in a moonless Spinozistic night.
What is more, German idealist,
Marxist, and psychoanalytic engagements with the sciences of the past several
decades—in particular, I am interested in engaging with biology and its
branches—arguably shed new light on the distinction between science and
scientism (with the latter as extra-scientific misrepresentations of the
former). Especially when it comes to the life sciences, as themselves the most
immediately relevant of the natural sciences to (materialist) theories of
subjectivity, many Continentalists and their fellow travelers throughout the
humanities subscribe to some questionable, and sometimes outright false,
articles of faith: All philosophers of mind are Churchlandian eliminative
materialists; Biology itself supports such eliminativism (or, at least,
austerely reductionist frameworks); There is no room in any bio-materialism for
such more-than-natural things as properly historical dynamics, socio-symbolic
mediators, uniquely human forms of sexuality, unconscious sides of mindedness
and like-mindedness, etc.; The sciences and their Analytic advocates promote
vulgar determinisms functioning as insidious ideological naturalizations of reigning
socio-historical distributions of power.
Not only do these dubious
beliefs unfairly ride roughshod over the wide variety of here-pertinent
positions in Analytic philosophy—with a gullibility reinforced by a superficial
impression of biology that goes no further than a textbook gloss on Watson and
Crick (overlaid on top of a sense of the sciences as still basically wedded to
the Newtonian Weltanschauung of corpuscular matter in mechanical
motion), they accept at face value the most extreme scientistic distortions as
representative of the sciences themselves. Although some scientists readily
provide grist for the polemical mills of Continental anti-naturalists, suffice
it to remark that far from everything scientists say is scientific (including
even when they are talking about their own disciplines). By contrast, my simple
message is that one does not have to sell one’s soul (in this instance, one’s
denaturalized subjectivity) in order to dance with the scientific devil.
Along with Malabou, Žižek, and
a few others, I philosophically interpret recent developments related to
epigenetics, neuroplasticity, and the like as signaling a “paradigm shift” of
sorts intra-scientifically revolutionizing the biological understanding of
human beings. And, in good Hegelian-Marxian fashion, I consider immanent
critiques almost always to be preferable to external ones. Whether mounted by
right-wing neo-Romantics, left-wing critical theorists, or whoever else,
assaults on the sciences from a purely non/anti-scientific outside have proven
to be ineffective and unconvincing at best (if not intellectually detrimental
and/or ideologically dangerous). Instead, a dialectical-speculative reading of
contemporary biology’s own logics, as a creative reenactment of the “organics”
of Hegel’s Naturphilosophie (especially as per his description in
the Phenomenology of “Observing Reason” as culminating in
phrenology), yields an image of humanity very different from the one presumed
by the majority of Europe-leaning scholars across the humanities as necessarily
arising from the empirical sciences of nature. On this note, I have another
simple (and, hopefully, encouraging) message for humanists: There is growing
scientific support for contesting the scientisms they rightly despise.
This question and the
subsequent two cover significantly overlapping areas. In fact, my answer to
this question already has bled over into what is asked about in your next one.
So, let me turn to it now.
PG: Can you speak further
about philosophy or theory’s relation to science? I think the move is dominant
today–whatever Continental philosophy is doing–to remake the humanities in the
science’s image; this of course is an old story going back a long time in Anglo
American philosophy. Thus while you might be right to reread Freud and Lacan
with the latest scientific findings in mind, some may worry that’s just a quick
step to someone taking an Occam’s razor and getting rid of this humanist
discourse in the first place.
AJ: To begin with, and as I
already indicated earlier, I am adamant in claiming that the conflict between
the anti-naturalism of the prevailing Continentalism of the theoretical
humanities and the flat, one-dimensional monist naturalism of certain (but far
from all) Analytic philosophers and natural scientists is the wrong battle. The
falsity of this struggle is due to an erroneous assumption shared between these
two otherwise opposed factions, namely, that the sciences inevitably and
invariably furnish nothing but “Occam’s razors” (to employ the phrasing of your
question) suited only for brutally slashing to death conceptions of human
subjects resisting reduction or elimination. From my perspective, these
naturalists are overconfident aggressors not nearly as well-armed as they
believe themselves to be. And, the anti-naturalists react to them with
unwarranted fear, buying into the delusions of their foes that these enemies
really do wield scientifically-solid, subject-slaying weapons. This
underconfident reaction thereby lamentably and unpardonably abandons the
entirety of the vast terrain of the sciences to the barbarism of the worst
species of pseudo-scientific naturalism.
By contrast, I defend a
combination of, one, an ontology of a “weak nature” (as I defined this phrase
in my response to your first question) epistemologically reflected in the
enduring disunity of the branches and sub-branches of the natural sciences (as
analyzed by, for example, the Stanford School of the philosophy of science)
with, two, a strong version of emergentism (including autonomous subjects
arising out of asubjective substances, with the former as irreducible,
ineliminable transcendences-in-immanence vis-à-vis the latter). This
specific combination, as emblematic of the heart of transcendental materialism
in terms of its interlinked ontology and theory of subjectivity, entails
philosophically reinterpreting the sciences of nature such that I justifiably
can proclaim as regards vulgar scientistic naturalism that, so to speak, the
emperor wears no clothes (and does not possess the razor-sharp implements he
imagines himself to own as his personal arsenal). Empty-handed adversaries do
not deserve to be feared. Moreover, fear of them, as unfounded as their
corresponding overconfidence, ought not to shape one’s intellectual strategies
and tactics.
Hegelian “concrete
universals,” Marxian “real abstractions,” and Lacanian “structures that march
in the streets” all similarly can be pressed into the service of arguing
against epiphenomenalisms according to which human mindedness and like-mindedness
(as both “subjective” and “objective” Spirit [Geist] in Hegel’s senses) can and
should be analytically decomposed and dissolved. That is to say, even if the
structures, dynamics, and phenomena of singular and collective subjectivities
are in some respects illusions, unrealities, virtualities, etc. (for example,
instances of “folk psychology” as per Churchlandian eliminative materialism),
insofar as these fictions actually steer concrete instances of cognition and
comportment, they are causally efficacious. And, hence, they are far from
epiphenomenal qua eliminable fantasies (incidentally, one does not have to be a
practicing clinical psychoanalyst to be acutely aware of just how influential
fantasies are in the lives of flesh-and-blood human beings). In other words,
subjects and their (virtual) realities are concrete, real abstractions that not
only walk amongst us, but, in essential fashions, indeed are us.
If the epiphenomenalisms of
eliminativists, mechanists, reductivists, and crude naturalists are fatally
flawed, then any metaphysics (qua systematically integrated epistemology and
ontology) aspiring to thorough completeness must take stock of and do justice
to the peculiar existences of strongly-emergent subjects and their
(inter-)related structures, dynamics, and phenomena. To refer once more to the
exact wording of your question, the presupposition that any science-informed
philosophical/theoretical apparatus necessarily is involved in an endeavor to
“remake the humanities in the sciences’ image” presumes too much, namely, that
the various epiphenomenalists are fundamentally correct in assuming that all
interdisciplinary relationships involving the natural sciences must be
lop-sidedly one-way as flowing exclusively in the thereby-privileged direction
of these sciences as the prioritized alpha-and-omega foundational
Ur-disciplines. Put differently, only if the epiphenomenalists are basically
right should all science-shaped materialisms conform to the standardly accepted
generalization having it that any and every such materialism automatically
entails transforming the humanities on the basis of the sciences but never vice
versa.
Therefore, in connection with
the preceding and for reasons I already have spelled out here, my
transcendentalism materialism, although admittedly seeking to affect various
changes to the subjects of the humanities through bringing them into contact
with the sciences, also and at the same time aims reciprocally to bring about
changes to the sciences through rendering more-than-natural/substantial
subjects absolutely immanent to these sciences’ natural substances. Faced with
a materialist theory of irreducible denaturalized subjectivity supported by a
science-indebted ontology of weak nature, the sciences, in order to think “substance
also as subject,” have to shift away from worldviews grounded upon a strong
Nature-with-a-capital-N (i.e., Nature as the One-All of a big Other of
subjectless substance both at one with itself as a whole and exhaustively
determining each and every one of its parts and sub-parts).
This would amount to a
profound shift with myriad consequences for any number of scientific research
programs, especially the life sciences concerned with human beings. Overall,
transcendental materialism facilitates and insists upon two-way, mutually
modifying flows of influence between, on the one hand, the natural sciences
and, on the other hand, the social sciences and the humanities—and this rather
than a misconceived winner-takes-all, zero-sum death match between science and
all comers.
Other broad aspects of my
conception of the science-philosophy rapport can be highlighted through another
reference to Badiou. I am sympathetic to select aspects of his manner of
situating philosophy vis-à-vis its extra-philosophical “conditions”
(i.e., the “generic procedures” of “truth-production,” with the truths
philosophy thinks being generated by “events” outside of it). As is common
knowledge, Badiou identifies four such generic procedures: art, love, politics,
and science. In the cases of the artistic and political conditions of
philosophy, with their specifically artistic and political events and truths,
he refuses to formulate a “philosophy of art” or a “political philosophy” as
instances of the philosopher arrogantly informing artists or activists what
their practices are or ought to be; artists and activists do not need the
philosopher to do their thinking for them. Instead, Badiou’s “inaesthetics” and
“metapolitics” represent philosophical registrations of properly artistic and
political events and truths respectively (unlike traditional philosophy of art
and political philosophy as imposing philosophical preconceptions about art and
politics onto these extra-philosophical fields). So too for science in
Badiouian philosophy: Focusing on the formal science of mathematics, which (as
the post-Cantorian trans-finite set theory of Zermelo-Fraenkel plus the axiom
of choice) Badiou identifies as itself ontology per se (i.e., the
pure-as-non-ontic thinking of “being qua being” [l’être en tant qu’être]), he
offers a philosophical interpretation of the Cantor-event and its
truth-consequences (up to and including Paul Cohen’s work on the continuum
hypothesis) in the form of a “metaontology.” Badiouian metaontology is to
science what his inaesthetics and metapolitics are to art and politics
respectively.
Badiou and I differ a
propos what counts as “science.” Under the influence of Koyré and
mid-twentieth-century French neo-rationalist epistemology, he limits it to pure
mathematics and perhaps the most thoroughly mathematized dimensions of physics
(particularly quantum physics). For him, unlike for me, the phrase “life
sciences” is an oxymoron. But, in the spirit, albeit not the letter, of
Badiou’s thinking, I also identify science (construed more broadly than Badiou)
as a condition of philosophy in the Badiouian sense that it would be
presumptuous for me to formulate a “philosophy of science” (perhaps it would be
fair to say that I furnish something closer to a “metabiology” or a
“metabiological” theory of the subject). I am neither willing nor able to do
the scientists’ thinking about their sciences for them, which they already do
much better than I could. But, as a committed materialist for whom the
empirical, experimental sciences of nature are key conditions for ontology
especially, I feel inescapably bound to respond to these disciplines,
interpreting and assimilating what, by my best assessments, they disclose that
looks to have potentially major and lasting philosophical significance.
Moreover, in cases where scientists’ presuppositions and/or posits spill over
into the more-than-empirical, extra-scientific terrain of interdisciplinary
theoretical speculation (as they inevitably do), philosophy clearly has pivotal
roles to play in refining and/or challenging such assumptions and assertions.
PG: I was wondering if you
could talk about the political stakes of your trilogy. Your previous work has
focused on how to think the event and the possibilities for political change.
Has any of that thought been reconsidered given what you’ve been writing
recently?
AJ: My earlier labors on
politics and the trilogy currently in progress primarily share a profound
indebtedness to Marxian historical and dialectical materialisms. Then and now,
I consider an important side of transcendental materialism to be what it
contributes by way of addressing the questions, problems, concerns, and
disputes it inherits from leftist political materialisms beginning with Marx
and Engels. As I said at the beginning in response to your first question, I
put forward transcendental materialism as, in part, a contemporary permutation
of Marxian-Engelsian dialectical materialism.
Before discussing the recent
and not-so-recent socio-cultural history behind the political facets of the
trilogy itself, I want briefly to sketch in what respects I see transcendental
materialism further enriching dialectical materialism in the Marxist tradition.
I quickly will list four aspects. One, it seeks to turn the natural sciences
generally and the life sciences particularly, themselves economically and
ideologically central to late-capitalist globalization, into Trojan horses
harboring infrastructural and superstructural implications undermining
capitalism from within (for example, such issues as the copyrighting and
engineering of plant, animal, and human genomes, private and public health
policies, and a teeming plethora of environmental concerns—these issues all are
entangled with biological sciences—have become key sites of social struggles).
Two, it frontally attacks those specifically scientistic ideologies speciously
naturalizing this enshrined socio-economic order (particularly Hobbesian-style
visions of “human nature” dressed up in pseudo-biological disguises by capitalism’s
apologists). Three, it helps inoculate Marxism against intra-Marxist straying
away from dialectical materialism and wandering toward either idealisms
(whether covert or overt) or non-dialectical (i.e., pre/anti-Hegelian)
materialisms (a range of Western [post-]Marxists allegedly are guilty of this,
from the early Lukács of the 1920s to the likes of Colletti). Four,
transcendental materialism, in its handling of the pairs nature-society and
heteronomy-autonomy, enables fine lines to be navigated between the Scylla of
overblown “determinism” (whether as economism, Stalinism, Althusserianism,
attentisme, fatalism, etc.) and the Charybdis of equally overblown “freedom”
(whether as Blanquism, anarchism, putschism, utopianism, voluntarism, etc.).
This fourth aspect is the one most to the fore in my prior critical analyses of
the political stakes of the Badiouian event and the Žižekian “act” to which you
refer in your question. All four of these political dimensions of
transcendental materialism are crucial to the three volumes of Prolegomena
to Any Future Materialism.
Panning back from Marxist
theory to a wider historical panorama, it seems to me quite uncontroversial to
remark that the tensions between science and religion have not gone away after
four hundred years since the dawn of the modern secular sciences. Not only do
permutations of this conflict between the scientific and the religious run
throughout many of the historical times and places covered in my work (such as
the France of the French materialists of the mid-to-late eighteenth century,
the Europe of the Left/Young Hegelians of the mid-nineteenth century, and the
Russia of the Bolsheviks of the early twentieth century)—they still are with us
today. Of course, the most familiar, widely disseminated variations on the
hackneyed science-versus-religion theme within the mass-media worlds of
journalists and politicians are easy for comparatively more sophisticated
intellectuals to mock as antiquated, cartoonish, simplistic, uninformed, and so
on. Although these variations indeed are bad abstractions in the ways faulted
by such criticisms and dismissals, they nonetheless simultaneously are
all-too-real abstractions. In other words, even if today’s popular cultural
recyclings of clashes between science and religion are ignorant anachronisms,
they are, as it were, live anachronisms with legs misguidedly but unfortunately
continuing to march on the streets of our present-day times. Like what now
appears to be the sadly self-fulfilling prophecy of the awful Huntingtonian
“clash of civilizations” (an initial lie that has viciously forced its way into
geo-political realities to terrible effect), the widespread clinging to past
(mis)conceptions of the scientific in relation to the religious (often
involving the Christianity and Islam to which Huntington refers as certain
“civilizations”) really has contributed to dragging the contemporary
conjuncture backwards. Ideas have tendencies not to remain confined to the
imagined inner sanctum of private, isolated minds; they translate and transform
themselves into materialized socio-historical actualities with palpable causal
efficacy. As Žižek’s theorizing drives home with special power, ideology,
despite its name, is far from strictly a matter of the ideational alone.
Recently, Badiou has
hypothesized that the renewed luster of timeliness taken on by Marxism is due
not (only) to the prophetic quality of many of Marx’s pronouncements: It is not
so much that Marx intellectually leapt forward from his mid-nineteenth century
into our early twenty-first. Rather, we have socio-economically regressed back
to his times, with post-Reagan/Thatcher capitalism being, in many ways, as
savage and cruel as that of early industrial England. Even shameless
cheerleaders for capitalist globalization, such as the writers for The
Economist, readily admit of their own accord that, nowadays, we are living in a
new Gilded Age with even greater inequalities than in the old one; the obscene
amounts of wealth continuing to be steadily accumulated in the hands of a tiny
minority would make even a robber baron blush. Along similar lines, Žižek has
taken to arguing that we have regressed further back still, to the Hegel who,
before Marx, sheds light on a “rabble” (Pöbel) immanently generated by capitalism
but differing, in several important respects, from Marx’s proletariat proper.
Žižek’s argument here is that those around the world immiserated and
dispossessed by today’s global capitalism tend to be excluded altogether from
the formal economic system, instead of being
included-as-exploitatively-employed within it (as in the case of the
low-skilled factory wage-laborers focused on as paradigmatic in Marx’s
analyses).
My friendly supplement to
Badiou’s and Žižek’s observations in these veins involves looking at the
transition between Hegel and Marx (in addition to Hegel and Marx themselves).
That is to say, in a shared Badiouian-Žižekian spirit, I would argue that we
also have regressed, in specific fashions, back to the time of the Left/Young
Hegelians’ critiques of religion and its political repercussions. Of course,
the entanglements of Christianity and post-Napoleonic reaction in the
German-speaking world of the 1830s and early 1840s were, in certain
non-negligible respects, peculiar to that context. But, from well before the
Zeitgeist of Feuerbach et al through our current conjuncture, religious ideas
and institutions, in various evolving guises, stubbornly have remained knotted
together with numerous things political. In this vein, for Badiou, Žižek, and
me, the later Lacan’s critical modifications of Freud’s Enlightenment-style
notions about the science-religion rapport are crucial inspirations for our
understandings of the present version of entwinements of techno-scientific
capitalism with neo-fundamentalist religiosities (I discuss this at several
points in The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy). Hence, just as
the critique of religion went hand-in-hand with that of existent political
circumstances for the Left/Young Hegelians (more so than Marx acknowledges in
moving beyond them), so too for me (as well as for Badiou and Žižek): The
critique of today’s revived religiosities is inseparable from that of
scientisms and capitalism. Moreover, as the immediately preceding already
implies, I feel it necessary to amend and qualify the early Marx’s statement, a
declaration of his break with the Left/Young Hegelian movement opening the
introduction to his 1843/1844 “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right,” that, “the criticism of religion has been essentially
completed.” Put with brutal succinctness, subsequent history since has
decompleted it. In the face of new theological and spiritual ghosts
proliferating and flourishing all around us, a new critique of religion uniting
the heart of Marx’s anticlerical French materialist and Left/Young Hegelian
predecessors with the head of Marxist non/post-contemplative materialism (i.e.,
not the unnuanced scientistic atheism of Dawkins and company) and
Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis is, at least by my lights, desperately needed.
Finally, given my investments
in the life sciences, it would be natural for someone to wonder what I might
have to say about the topic of “biopolitics” still so fashionable in
Continental philosophy and the theoretical humanities. A propos its
initial incarnation in the late Foucault’s formulations, I vehemently disagree
with his assertion that the Marxists of Really Existing Socialism in the
twentieth century failed to wrestle with what he associates with biopower. An inspiration
for France’s nouveaux philosophes, Foucault caricatures Marxism as
blinkered by an obsession with traditional state apparatuses and, hence, just
as prey as capitalism to the insidious rise of biopolitical paradigms of
governmentality. As I argue in A Weak Nature Alone, this totally ignores
the intense theoretical and practical experiments at the intersection of
politics and the (life) sciences conducted in the first decades of the
U.S.S.R.’s existence (its slide into technocratic-bureaucratic dictatorship
certainly was not due to a lack of serious reflection upon the rationally
planned, mass-scale management of the life of populations demographically
conceived). Not only do I contest Foucault’s claims about the radical Left’s
past relations (or lack thereof) with biopolitics—unlike him, I also believe
that a renewed Marxist confrontation with biopower nowadays is both possible
and even preferable to any non-Marxist ones.
As I understand Agamben, his
popular updating and extension of the Foucauldian theory of biopolitics
involves correcting Foucault’s own habit of sometimes talking as though this
new framework for governing simply supersedes the old model of sovereignty. I
concur with Agamben’s thesis that biopower (varyingly conceived) functions to modify,
rather than replace, sovereign power, being a historical mutation internal to
the latter. That said, I have reservations as regards the Agambenian bios-zoē distinction
so central to Homo Sacer and many of his other texts. Malabou already
is developing problematizations of this distinction on the basis of epigenetics
and plasticity à la the life sciences. She is quite right that Foucault and
Agamben exhibit little knowledge of biology despite discoursing at length about
things “bio-.” While completely agreeing with her about this, I nonetheless
feel compelled to reconcile the scientific falsity of the bios-zoē conceptual
couplet with what strikes me as an undeniable ring of truth resonating out from
Foucault’s and Agamben’s descriptions of biopolitics. My version of such a
reconciliation would be that the bios-zoē distinction can remain true
as a real abstraction (i.e., a causally efficacious ideological reality)
precisely because it is scientifically false at the level of bio-material
being. The actual, factual absence of “bare life” as a first-nature zoē unmediated
by second-nature bios is precisely what allows the untrue virtual fiction of
such a distinction to bed down in the the literal flesh of human bodies and
thereby become “true” despite its scientific and ontological falsity (and this
through remaking the subject’s body in its own image, with this body being open
to such remaking precisely through its lack of zoē as standardly understood).
This “true lie” thereby eclipses and effaces the corporeal ground that
simultaneously makes it possible and contradicts its specious truth. Or, put
differently, its practical-political victory testifies to its
theoretical-philosophical defeat, however much or little cold comfort this
affords.
Peter Gratton is
Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Memorial University of Newfoundland.
He is the author of The State of Sovereignty: Lessons from the Political
Fictions of Modernity (SUNY Press, 2012) and Speculative Realism:
Problems and Prospects (Bloomsbury, 2014).
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