last post of the evening

Also just wanted to respond quickly to Ben at NaughtThought, who just posted this:

“Quite a bit more needs to be said about Hegel in relation to SR (as well as Deleuze and SR) as it seems bost sides are carcicturing the other a bit – non SR people seem to think Meillassoux and company are merely asking for a turning back of the clock to dogmatism/rationalism etc and those working against Zizek/Badiou over-simplify them in terms of what materialism means. While in NM for a conference last weekend I was able to have brunch with Adrian Johnston and he remarked how he was tired of being called a high flying idealist as he thought that Pippin’s work on Hegel had obliterated such assumptions about Hegelianism.”

Zizek says openly that true materialism means that the outer world doesn’t exist. You can’t really call that an isolated flippant remark in an interview, because that’s the core of his position. Of course he wants to say that, nonetheless, he’s not really an idealist. Husserlians also often claim that Husserl isn’t an idealist too. That doesn’t make them right.

As a general rule, people who claim that the realism/idealism dispute is a false dispute invariably come down on the side of idealism, they simply don’t want to admit it. Where in Zizek, Badiou, Lacan, or even Johnston, does one find a treatment of relations between two non-human entities without humans on the scene speaking about or observing it? I see no room in any of these authors for such a thing. This is a simple fact, not an “oversimplification” as Ben sees it. This is a pretty old story by now, and I’m tired of people claiming it’s a false problem, because the philosophical stakes are incalculable.

I want to read more of Johnston before referring to him as a “high-flying idealist,” but I’ll openly call Zizek that right now. No question.