Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers

Adrian Johnston’s transcendental materialism offers a new theoretical approach to the issues of science vs religion and mind vs body. Arming himself with resources provided by German idealism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, the life sciences and contemporary philosophical developments, Johnston formulates an account of subjectivity that, although being both materialist and naturalist, does full justice to human beings as irreducible to natural matter alone. At the same time he argues against relapses into idealisms, dualisms and spiritualisms. ’Adventures in Transcendental Materialism’ elaborates Johnston’s position through critical engagements with some of today’s most important thinkers including Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Catherine Malabou, Jean-Claude Milner, Martin Hagglund, William Connolly and Jane Bennett.

Adrian Johnston is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute.
He is the author of Time Driven (2005), Zizek’s Ontology (2008), Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations (2009), and Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume One (2013), all published by Northwestern University Press. He is the co-author, with Catherine Malabou, of Self and Emotional Life (Columbia University Press, 2013).