Adventures in Transcendental Materialism

Adrian Johnston is Distinguished Professor and Chair at the Department of Philosophy, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA. He is the author of Time Driven (2005), Žižek’s Ontology (2008), Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations (2009), and Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume One (2013), all published by Northwestern University Press. He is the co-author, with Catherine Malabou, of Self and Emotional Life (Columbia University Press, 2013).

Adrian Johnston strikes again. This new book is a most comprehensive and rigorous account of the contemporary philosophical debates concerning materialism and the necessity of its conceptual reinvention. In arguing his own original conceptual line, Johnston addresses most of the critical points in the contemporary materialism debate. And he does so with breathtaking ease, strolling among various key philosophical projects. This excellent book is a delightful must for everybody concerned with materialism and related matters.

• Acknowledgements; Introduction: Reports From Philosophical Fronts: Exchanges with Contemporaries Past and Present; Part I: No Illusions: Hegel, Lacan, and Transcendental Materialism; Chapter 1: The Latest System-Program of German Idealism: From Tübingen to Today; Chapter 2: For a Thoughtful Ontology: Hegel’s Immanent Critique of Spinoza; Chapter 3: “Off with their thistleheads!”: Against Neo-Spinozism; Chapter 4: “Lacan, our Hegel”: Psychoanalysis, Dialectics, and Materialisms; Part II: Žižek: Dossier of an Ongoing Debate; Chapter 5: Hegel’s Luther: Žižek’s Materialist Hegelianism; Chapter 6: In Nature More Than Nature Itself: Žižek Between Naturalism and Supernaturalism; Chapter 7: Spirit Is a Quark: Quantum Physics with Žižek; Part III: Transcendental Materialism’s Significant Others: Psychoanalysis, Science, and Religion; Chapter 8: Life Terminable and Interminable: Hägglund and the Afterlife of the Afterlife; Chapter 9: The true Thing is the (w)hole: Freudian-Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Hägglund’s Chronolibidinal Reading; Chapter 10: Antiphilosophy and Paraphilosophy: Milner, Badiou, and Antiphilosophical Lacanianism; Chapter 11: The Real Unconscious: Malabou, Soler, and Psychical Life After Lacan; Chapter 12: Toward a Grand Neuropolitics: Why I am not an immanent naturalist or vital materialist; Works Cited.