Charles William Johns – författare

This intriguing and compact book investigates whether or not philosophy can have a use in the face of ‘capitalist realism’ today. Can philosophy study everyday objects like computers and mobile phones? Can it think of advertising, the population, electricity, buildings and even dreams as ‘objects’ in their own right, which convey particular and novel qualities when analysed?

Johns’ book starts from an immanent phenomenological study of objects, arguing that such objects disclose larger systems of anthropological meaning and control. The author moves away from the Husserlian ‘essence’ of the object and embeds his objects in a series of ‘uses’ (or ‘equipment’ as Heidegger called it). However, Johns makes a speculative move by positing the very existence of such ‘uses’ distinct from the human and first person phenomenological consciousness.  This is when the annals of phenomenology meet contemporary strands of realism such as Speculative and Object Oriented models. For Johns, the world is in a constant state of being utilised, not merely through humans but through objects and their relations, and not only on a macro scale but on a micro scale (described by the theories of quantum physics).

The object then becomes a locus of use, yet, importantly, one that can never be reduced to relations alone. This is because the author believes that certain aspects of a relation withholds itself in its act of relating. The mutual dynamics of relation and property are thus rearticulated in a new light. This novel description of relation places Johns squarely between relational ontologies (such as Deleuze, Latour and Garcia) and non-relational ontologies (Harman).

This book deals with the possibility of an ontological and epistemological account of the psychological category ''neurosis''. Intertwining thoughts from German idealism, Continental philosophy and psychology, the book shows how neurosis precedes and exists independently from human experience and lays the foundations for a non-essentialist, non-rational theory of neurosis; in cognition, in perception, in linguistics and in theories of object-relations and vitalism. The personal essays collected in this volume examine such issues as assimilation, the philosophy of neurosis, aneurysmal philosophy, and the connection between Hegel and Neurosis, among others. The volume establishes the connection between a now redundant psycho-analytic term and an extremely progressive discipline of Continental philosophy and Speculative realism.