Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy
280
Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy
280Paperback
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| ISBN-13: | 9780810129122 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/31/2013 |
| Series: | Diaeresis , #1 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
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PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE MATERIALISM
Volume One: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy
By Adrian Johnston
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2013 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2912-2
CHAPTER 1
Conflicted Matter: The Challenge of Secularizing Materialism
§1 Emerging Cracks: The Birth of a Truly Atheistic Materialism
Materialism, the brute insistence that there is nothing alien to matter, appears to offer no place whatsoever to anything even vaguely intangible or spiritual. It denies that there are ineffable entities or forms set apart from the immanence of incarnate beings. Badiou characterizes this basic position of vehement opposition vis-à-vis all varieties of idealism as "a philosophy of assault." More specifically, materialist philosophies throughout history exhibit a common hostility toward religiosity insofar as the latter appeals to the supposed existence of some sort of extraphysical, immaterial dimension of transcendent (ultra-)being. From Lucretius to La Mettrie and beyond, the natural world of the material universe is celebrated, in an anti-Platonic vein, as a self-sufficient sphere independent of ideas or gods. A properly materialist ontology posits matter alone—nothing more, nothing less.
And yet, despite the clarity and simplicity of this rejection of spirituality in all its guises, a rejection functioning as an essential defining feature of any and every species of materialism, periodic critical reminders seemingly are necessary in order to ward off the recurrent tendency to backslide into idealism through blurring the lines of demarcation between materialism and what it rejects. A century ago, V. I. Lenin, in his 1908 text Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, issues just such a reminder (a reminder drawing heavily upon Friedrich Engels's insistence, in his 1888 Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, on the centrality of this elementary, insurmountable "split ... into two great camps," that is, materialism and idealism). Regardless of the many philosophical shortcomings of this hundred-year-old book (as well as its sheer monotony and mind-numbing repetitiveness), one of its priceless virtues is Lenin's unflinching insistence on the indissoluble, black-and-white border strictly separating materialism from idealism. Lenin tirelessly uncovers, exposes, and critiques a number of subtle and not-so-subtle efforts to disguise and pass off idealist notions as materialist concepts, efforts to soften the stinging antispiritualist, irreligious virulence of this ruthlessly combative philosophical stance. Just as Søren Kierkegaard maintains that agnosticism ultimately cannot distinguish itself from atheism—for Kierkegaard, as for Blaise Pascal, not choosing to believe (i.e., agnosticism) is still tantamount to choosing not to believe (i.e., atheism)—so too does Lenin contend that there is no genuine middle ground between materialism and idealism, with any compromise or negotiation between the two amounting, in the de facto end, to a disingenuous, obfuscating betrayal of the materialist position in favor of idealist tendencies.
To resuscitate the heart of materialism today, another such Leninist gesture is urgently called for in light of recent philosophical trends seeking to render materialist thinking compatible with such orientations as Platonism and Judeo-Christianity. Materialism is at risk of, as it were, losing its soul in these confused current circumstances, since it is nothing without its denial of the existence of deities or any other ephemeral pseudothings utterly unrelated to the realness of the beings of matter. Succinctly stated, a nonatheistic materialism is a contradiction in terms. When, for instance, the objects/referents of theology, mathematics, and structuralism are spoken of as though they are equally as "material" as the entities and phenomena addressed by the natural sciences, something is terribly wrong. At a minimum, this muddle-headed situation raises a red flag signaling that the word "matter" has become practically meaningless. Dangerous dilutions of materialism, dilutions resembling the then contemporary trends of Machism and empirio-monism denounced by Lenin in 1908 as means for weakening and subverting materialism, are part of the contemporary scene in the theoretical humanities. Another materialist effort at assault is required once more, a stubborn, unsubtle effort that single-mindedly refuses to be distracted and derailed from its task by engaging with the seductive nuances and intricacies of elaborate systems of spiritualism however honestly displayed or deceptively hidden. In light of Lacan's insistence that the truth is sometimes stupid—one easily can miss it and veer off into errors and illusions under the influence of the assumption that it must be profoundly elaborate and obscure—a tactical, healthy dose of pig-headed, close-minded stupidity on behalf of materialism might be warranted nowadays.
Strangely enough, in a session of his famous seventeenth seminar on The Other Side of Psychoanalysis given during the academic year 1969–1970, Lacan utters some rather cryptic remarks that predict a resurfacing of the need for a new purifying purge of the ranks of materialism, enabling the line separating it from idealism to be drawn yet again in a bold, unambiguous fashion. Therein, he advances a surprising thesis—"materialists are the only authentic believers" (this thesis is later echoed in the twentieth seminar of 1972–1973 as well as foreshadowed by discussions in the seventh seminar of 1959–1960 about the concealed presence of God in evolutionism). Of course, what renders this quite counterintuitive claim initially so odd is the deeply ingrained association between materialism and atheism. At its very core, does not materialism constitute a rude, violent attack upon the conceptual foundations of all religions? Do not the diverse manifestations of this philosophical discipline—in 1970, Lacan clarifies that the materialism he has in mind here is that of the eighteenth century in particular (i.e., that elaborated by Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Denis Diderot, and the Marquis de Sade, among others)—share an antipathy toward faith in anything above and beyond the de-spiritualized immanence of the material universe? This very last word ("universe"), insofar as it implies a vision of material being as the integrated organic totality of a cosmic One-All, contains the key to decoding productively Lacan's startling assertion that the materialism usually hovering around and informing the natural sciences—the naturalism espoused during the eighteenth century arguably continues to serve, more often than not, as (to quote Althusser) the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists—represents a disguised body of religious belief despite itself.
Through the example of Sade (in particular, select passages to be found in his Juliette), Lacan explains that the materialists of the eighteenth century end up making matter into God (and doing so, it might be noted, in certain ways resonating with the ancient atomism of Lucretius). Material being becomes something eternal, indestructible, and omnipotent (the first two of these three features allegedly being embodied, in Sade's writings, by the immortal body of the torturer's victim, a fantasized flesh able to endure indefinitely an infinite amount of pain). Lacan views the Sadian flux of nature, with its intense processes of becoming, as the basis for a monotheism-in-bad-faith resting on foundations not so different from those of the enshrined religions spurned by the ostensibly atheist libertine. Apart from Sade's views on nature, Lacan also emphasizes again and again how Sade's practical philosophy (specifically his ethics) involves the pseudotransgressions of a perverse subject; this subject's vain, petty pleasures either secretly strive to sustain the existence of a God-like big Other serving as a locus of moral judgment in relation to his or her perverse activities or pretend to be placed at the service of this Other's enjoyment. In the case of Sade avec Lacan, the supposedly vanquished divinity of monotheistic religion returns with a vengeance in the guise of a system of nature at one with itself, a cosmos harmoniously constituting the sum total of reality (much like the murdered primal father of Freud's Totem and Taboo, who is endowed with even greater potency when reincarnated in the form of a body of prohibitory laws). God is far from dead so long as nature is reduced to being the receptacle for and receiver of his attributes and powers. It is not much of a leap to propose that the scientism accompanying modern natural science as a whole, up through the present, tends to be inclined to embrace the nonempirical supposition of the ultimate cohesion of the material universe as a self-consistent One-All (hence, in the twenty-fourth seminar, Lacan's assertion that science, even in the current era, relies upon "the idea of God"). In this resides its hidden theosophical nucleus. Lacan's claims regarding Sade and eighteenth-century materialisms, materialisms still alive and well today, imply a challenge to which a novel contemporary constellation involving alliances between factions within philosophy, science, and psychoanalysis can and must rise: the challenge of formulating a fully secularized materialism, a Godless ontology of material being nonetheless able to account for those things whose (apparent) existence repeatedly lures thinkers onto the terrain of idealist metaphysics.
§2 "You've Got to Break Some Eggs to Make an Hommelette": Lacan and the Materialist Legacies of Eighteenth-Century France
Sade isn't the only example of the disavowed or repressed religiosity Lacan imputes to the materialism of eighteenth-century France. The contemporaries La Mettrie and Diderot are, in peculiar manners, more productive to examine here. The Lacan of the 1950s is understandably rather critical of La Mettrie's mechanical materialism, despite sympathetically viewing La Mettrie as a precursor of cybernetics (of course, cybernetics is the parent discipline of what comes to be cognitive science—and, at the time, Lacan sees cybernetics as moving along lines similar to his antihumanist accounts of the symbolic-linguistic structuring of the unconscious and subjectivity). In particular, he is wary of La Mettrie's grounding of the human creature's machine-like being in the physical stuff of the natural, organic body. For Lacan, psychoanalysis, starting with Freud himself and continuing through ego psychology and object-relations theory, recurrently expresses the craving for the reassurance that there's a solid biological foundation (as bodily energy, instinctual forces, etc.) underpinning the conceptual scaffolding of metapsychology. Due to this craving, something akin to the mechanistic materialism of La Mettrie allegedly exerts an attractive pull on the imaginations of analysts. Lacan is opposed here not so much to the mechanistic depiction of humanity—during this early period of le Séminaire, he often portrays his quasi-structuralist antihumanism as likewise, so to speak, in-humanizing human beings such that they come to resemble machines run by the programs of impersonal symbol systems—but to the naturalizing materialism of La Mettrie (and, by extension, the Diderot who unreservedly tethers the soul [l'âme] to the body). He contends that analysts who surrender to the temptation to hypothesize biological grounds for the phenomena addressed by analysis succumb to an illusion, misrecognizing the Symbolic dimension of the non-biological, structural dynamics of signifiers as the Real dimension of the natural flesh of the human animal. From a perspective concerned with the distinction between materialism and idealism, it seems that Badiou is not without a certain amount of justification for accusing this Lacan of "idéalinguisterie," an antimaterialist, macro-level idealism of the symbolic order in which a transindividual, semidematerialized formal network autonomously dictates the functioning of its subjected subjects.
However, La Mettrie's materialism merits closer examination in light of my agenda to forge a thoroughly atheistic materialism using select resources from philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the natural sciences. On the one hand, La Mettrie cannot be exculpated in the face of charges (leveled by Lacan, among others) that he promotes a vulgar naturalism according to which the only real reality is that of physical bodies. He is indeed largely guilty of striking such a stance. And yet, on the other hand, despite his endorsement of a reductive monism of unified, conflict-free corporeal substance—La Mettrie speaks of everything as having been shaped out of "but one dough" and of "the material unity of man"—he subsequently veers, somewhat inconsistently, in the direction of a Spinozistic dual-aspect monism (the inconsistency being the fact that Baruch Spinoza's monistic God-substance is neither thinking nor extended substance, with both the ideas of minds and the parts of bodies being two aspects [i.e., "attributes"] of this one neither-mental-nor-physical substance). La Mettrie admits that, despite his insistence on the dependence of the spiritual mind/soul upon the stuff of the body (with its material brain), the details of the rapport binding the former to the latter remain mysterious—"we come to connect the admirable power of thought with matter, without being able to see the links, because the subject of this attribute is essentially unknown to us." He goes on to declare that "man is a machine, and ... in the whole universe there is but a single substance differently modified." It is somewhat unclear whether this "single substance" is still strictly corporeal in nature, especially if, as in Spinoza's rationalist metaphysics, "thought" and "matter" are two different modifications of a single, universal substance. Perhaps La Mettrie's 1747 assertions, whether intentionally or unintentionally, open onto the enigma/problem of constructing a materialism that can affirm, at the same time, both a monism of matter as well as a distinction between matter and mind without invoking a God-substance as a medium inexplicably sustaining an all-encompassing unity-in-difference. In this vein, Lenin insists, "That both thought and matter are 'real,' i.e., exist, is true. But to say that thought is material is to make a false step, a step towards confusing materialism and idealism." The difficulty would be to formulate a materialist distinction between the physical and the mental without simply reducing the latter to the former, a difficulty Badiou too identifies when, in his 1982 Theory of the Subject, he depicts materialism as resting on two axioms in tension with each other: first, the monist thesis "There is the One" (i.e., the "thesis of identity"), meaning that, ontologically speaking, there is only matter as the "the primitive unity of being"; and, second, the posited hegemony of matter over mind (i.e., the "thesis of primacy"), a posited hegemony that seems to contradict the first monist thesis by maintaining that "There is the Two" (i.e., the dualist thesis that there is a distinction between that which is material and that which is not). Or, as the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter admits, neither monism nor dualism is an unproblematic ontological option. Anyhow, apropos La Mettrie, Lacan would point out that what still remains religious in his thinking is the insistence on the fundamental self-consistency of nature as an undivided cosmic totality.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE MATERIALISM by Adrian Johnston. Copyright © 2013 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface: Clearing the Ground: The First Volume of Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction: "One Surely Will Be Found One Day to Make an Ontology with What I Am Telling You": The Road to a Post-Lacanian Materialism 3
Part 1 Jacques Lacan: Between the Sacred and the Secular
1 Conflicted Matter: The Challenge of Secularizing Materialism 13
2 Turning the Sciences Inside Out: Revisiting "Science and Truth" 39
3 On Deep History and Psychoanalysis: Phylogenetic Time in Lacanian Theory 59
Part 2 Alain Badiou: Between Form and Matter
4 What Matter(s) in Ontology: The Hebb-Event and Materialism Split from Within 81
5 Phantom of Consistency: Kant Troubles 108
Part 3 Quentin Meillassoux: Between Faith and Knowledge
6 The World Before Worlds: The Ancestral and Badiou's Anti-Kantian Transcendentalism 131
7 Hume's Revenge: À Dieu, Meillassoux? 148
Postface: From Critique to Construction: Toward a Transcendental Materialism 175
Notes 211
Works Cited 235
Index 253