[PT 11.

1 (2010) 158-160] doi:10.1558/poth.v11i1.158

Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317X Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

Adrian Johnstons Reply to Clayton Crocketts Review of his Book Adrian Johnston, Wilson College, Chambersburg, PA, USA aojohns@unm.edu To begin with, I would like to thank Clayton Crockett for his thoughtful assessment of my work. Before providing responses to certain of his points at the level of theoretical argumentation, I should say a few things about the history of the manuscript that became the published version of ieks Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Originally, the manuscript contained a fourth section on the iekian Marx as well as an appendix on ieks critical relation to Badiou. Due to the understandable concerns of Northwestern University Press about the length of this text, I decided to cut both the fourth section and the appendix. Some of this excised material went on to become, in modified form, part of what is now my new book entitled Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (published by Northwestern University Press in 2009). My hope is that this new book succeeds at satisfactorily addressing many of the questions and concerns articulated so well by Crockett. Moreover, whereas ieks Ontology was written before Badious sequel to Being and Event, Logiques des mondes, appeared, Badiou, iek, and Political Transformations contains extended engagements with this 2006 tome. However, in mentioning the above, I do not intend either to make excuses for what ieks Ontology doesnt discuss at length (in particular, Badiou, politics, and theology) by appealing to nothing more than the practical constraints of its publication process or to avoid responding here-and-now to Crocketts review merely by signing a promissory note to the effect that a sequel book will respond subsequently instead. So as not to be guilty of these two evasions, I must, first, justify my decision to excise from the original manuscript of ieks Ontology the fourth section on Marx and the appendix on Badiou, and, second, indicate with some specificity how my new material speaks to the issues raised by Crockett. As Crockett notes, the three sections of the published version of ieks Ontology are devoted to ieks Lacan-inspired appropriations of Kant, Schelling and Hegel, respectively. And, as his review indicates
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he appreciates, this is grounded on the wager that, in reading iek, its worth taking seriously his repeated vehement insistence that the very core of his overall project consists in a Lacanian re-deployment of an interlinked ontology and theory of the subject deeply indebted to Kant and the post-Kantian German idealists. Rather than ignore this insistence by interpretively obsessing over his references to popular culture and current events, as many of those constituting his audience so often do, I chose to take iek at his word. Insofar as Badiou, politics and theology are not mentioned in ieks recurrent confessions of what lies at the heart of his endeavors, I opted to publish a book focused solely on his combination of Lacanianism and German idealism (additionally, apropos some of Crocketts remarks, iek doesnt start offering readers detailed treatments of Badiouian thought and Judeo-Christian theology until the late 1990s, something to be contrasted with the fact that Lacan and the German idealists remain constant points of reference throughout his corpus from start to present). I leave it up to readers of ieks Ontology to judge the consequent productivity of my decision. Following from this, my thesis is that iek positions himself vis--vis Badiou, politics and theology on the foundational basis of the theoretical system delineated in ieks Ontology. More than anything else, what makes for the crucial differences between Badiou and iek is the latters reliance on the German idealists for his ontology and conception of subjectivity. Once one fully comprehends these aspects of the iekian philosophical apparatus, a properly thorough understanding of his perspectives on Badious body of work becomes truly possible. As for political theory (especially in the Marxist tradition), again, ieks models of subjectification, universality, and historical temporalities, models absolutely central to his reflections on politics, are forged by him first and foremost within the context of Lacanian examinations of Kant, Schelling and Hegel. I am tempted to go so far as to suggest that one simply cannot appreciate his politics without having a firm handle on his philosophy (to employ tactically an admittedly crude distinction between politics and philosophy). Last but not least, there is the matter of theology. Although Badiou, iek, and Political Transformations discusses the Badiou-iek rapport through immanently critiquing their overlapping theories of subjectivities, acts and events, it deliberately pays relatively little attention to the role of religion in either of these thinkers oeuvres. In a series of other texts (some of which will go toward composing a book-in-progress tentatively entitled A Weak Nature Alone: Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism), I indicate why.1
1. Adrian Johnston, Conflicted Matter: Jacques Lacan and the Challenge of Secularizing Materialism, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 19 (Spring 2008): 16688; Adrian
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In this context, I can utter only a few blunt assertions. First of all, despite their flirtations with religious and theological notions, Badiou and iek are, on several levels, radically atheistic philosophers. Secondly, ieks interests in Christianity in particular ultimately are determined by political pursuits based upon an irreligious Marxism. Finally, I am presently in the midst of struggling to elaborate, on the basis of the transcendental materialism referred to in the subtitle of ieks Ontology, a materialist ontology and theory of the subjectmore precisely, a materialism (of a weak nature) profoundly influenced by the natural sciences in which those phenomena and structures seeming to require theology for their expression are explained in a non-reductive-yet-non-religious fashion. At the intersection of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, the life sciences, and select philosophies, I seek to assemble a naturalist-materialist account of those denaturalized, more-than-material temporalities and subjectivities supposedly falling under the jurisdiction of theologies. In my view, one can remain completely committed to the secular legacy of the Enlightenment without thereby sooner or later resignedly condemning oneself to the lukewarm ethical-aesthetic nihilism of todays biopolitical, pseudoscientific materialisms justly denounced by Badiou and iek.

Johnston, What Matter(s) in Ontology: Alain Badiou, the Hebb-Event, and Materialism Split from Within, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 13.1 (April 2008): 2749; Adrian Johnston, Phantom of Consistency: Alain Badiou and Kantian Transcendental Idealism, Continental Philosophy Review 41.3 (September 2008): 34566; Adrian Johnston, The Weakness of Nature: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Negativity Materialized, in Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politic and the Dialectic, ed. Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis and Slavoj iek (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010 [forthcoming]).
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