Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (Volume 1)

by Adrian Johnston

Adrian Johnston’s Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, planned for three volumes, will lay the foundations for a new materialist theoretical apparatus, his “transcendental materialism.” In this first volume, Johnston clears an opening within contemporary philosophy and theory for his unique position. He engages closely with Lacan, Badiou, and Meillassoux, demonstrating how each of these philosophers can be seen as failing to forge an authentically atheistic materialism. Johnston builds a new materialism both profoundly influenced by these brilliant comrades of a shared cause as well as making up for the shortcomings of their own creative attempts to bring to realization the Lacanian vision of an Other-less, One-less ontology. The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy yields intellectual weapons suitable for deployment on multiple fronts simultaneously, effective against the mutually entangled spiritualist and scientistic foes of our post-Enlightenment, biopolitical era of nothing more than commodities and currencies. 

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychoanalysis

280 pages, Paperback

First published July 31, 2012

About the author

American philosopher. He is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. 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.

Reviews

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min]

Johnston's task is nothing less than titanic--to lay bare the transcendental conditions of the transcendental conditions of subjectivity, to demonstrate, in a rigorously immanent and atheistic manner, how the speaking subject/intentionality/reason/subjectivity/symbolic order/the-less-than-material emerges from the material stuff itself. This first volume intends to purge all idealism and religiosity from the work of the several French thinkers of the genesis of the transcendental whom Johnston sees as fellow travellers--Lacan, Badiou and Meillasoux. He exercises sober but admirable charity in separating the militant emergent materialist wheat from the idealist-immaterialist shaff.
According to Johnston, Lacan's critical insight that there is no One-All, totality, Big Other should be preserved while his conservative interdiction that we shouldn't inquire into the genesis of the transcendental should be contested. From this Johnston is able to secure the bare minimum notion of nature as riddled with gaps and holes instead of being governed by hard deterministic laws. Next, turning to Badiou's avowed "materialist" theory of the subject Johnston takes issue with Badiou's formalistic elevation of a particular subdiscipline of pure mathematics (a specific axiomatic of Cantor's set theory) and calls him out on his uncritical dismissal of the life sciences, specifically neuroscience. Finally, Meillasoux's speculative materialism is exposed as a bold but deeply flawed attempt to reinstate materialism. For Johnston, both Badiou and Meillasoux, unable to fully exorcise the spirit of Heidegger, end up sanctioning a sharp distinction between ontological inquiry and the ontic disciplines to the detriment of their respective philosophical projects. Their critical error lies in the failure to pay sufficient attention to the historical dialectical rapport between the ontic and the ontological.
This book is not a polemic but an invitation for further constructive discussion. Johnston could have made his case stronger by a more direct engagement with the literature on analytic philosophy of rhe mind. In any case, an average analytic philosopher working on the problem of free will vs determinism is unlikely to take Lacan or Badiou or Meillasoux seriously. There's a danger that Johnston's plea for syncretism might fall on deaf ears. Reading Johnston's account, one is also reminded of Brassier's appropriation of astrophysics via the concept of 'extinction', which is supposed to be a futural radicalisation of arche-fossil, may be good model of what taking the natural sciences (the ontic disciplines which, according to Johnston's diagnosis of Badiou and Meillasoux, are disparaged by the latter) seriously can benefit and inform one's views on the relative emergentist autonomy of thought/signifier/reason/intentionality/the-more-than-material over the material.

I am certainly excited to read the second volume of the trilogy!

[Jim Richards]

This was one of the most overpriced books I've ever been fooled into buying. After reading his book on Zizek's Ontology I was duped into paying like 40 dollars for this book when I pre-ordered it in 2013. I found that it mostly consists of him summarizing other people's ideas and mocking them for being "less than materialistic than moi," without however saying much of anything about how his own ideas would be any better. I later just gave this book away cuz there was no use re-reading so redundant and disappointing a book.