Adrian Johnston (philosopher)

Adrian Johnston is an 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.^[3]

Philosophical work

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.^[4] 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 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, can only give us subjectless substance, Johnston’s work has brought Lacanianism into the 21st century when many wrongly claimed it died long before the end of the last.^[4]

Johnston 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), and Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume One: The Outcome of contemporary French Philosophy (2013), all published by Northwestern University Press. He is the co-author, with Catherine Malabou, of Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (Columbia University Press, 2013).

Johnston's most recent book is Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) with Todd McGowan and Slavoj Žižek. He is also a co-editor of the book series Diaeresis at Northwestern University Press.

References