one line from the Adrian Johnston interview

I’m glad to see that the Cosmos and History issue contains an interview with Adrian Johnston, HERE. I just want to respond to one of Adrian’s points.

“…and someone like Harman; one of the things that is clearly part of the agenda of the wing of speculative realism that he represents is this anti-anthropocentrism, this wanting to argue against human privilege: we’re not exceptional we’re just a certain weird set of objects amongst others and so on and so forth… that to me is the big difference between myself and someone like Harman. As I might put it somewhat provocatively, I’m just not enough of a self-hating human. It’s what Freud would call moral masochism.”

But I’m not sure how it represents “self-hating masochism” to say that humans are not the ontological root of everything. If anything, the tables should be turned here and we should ask Adrian why human-centric ontology isn’t “self-loving narcissism.”

We’re humans, and thus humans and their features are of especial interest to us. It may even be that humans have certain special, amazing properties that nothing else in the universe has. But it does not follow that these special, amazing properties deserve to establish a sweeping dualism of the sort that Johnston, like Žižek (and Badiou and even Meillassoux), proposes.

It would be like saying: “If you don’t think America should dominate the world, then you must be a self-hating, masochistic American.” Non sequitur.

(Adrian’s paper in Dundee was superb, by the way. He’s one of those speakers where you can’t help but pay attention to each and every word without ever getting distracted.)