Adrian Johnston (born 1974) is an American philosopher. He is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the

University of New Mexico The University of New Mexico (UNM; ) is a public research university in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States. Founded in 1889 by the New Mexico Territorial Legislature, it is the state's second oldest university, a flagship university in th ...

Albuquerque Albuquerque ( ; ), also known as ABQ, Burque, the Duke City, and in the past 'the Q', is the List of municipalities in New Mexico, most populous city in the U.S. state of New Mexico, and the county seat of Bernalillo County, New Mexico, Bernal ...

and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in

Atlanta Atlanta ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Georgia (U.S. state), most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia. It is the county seat, seat of Fulton County, Georg ...

Philosophical work

Influenced by

Slavoj Žižek Slavoj Žižek ( ; ; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian Marxist philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, Global Distin ...

and his readings of

German idealism German idealism is a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with Romanticism and the revolutionary ...

, Johnston's work is guided by what he calls “ transcendental materialism”: an ontology that is materialist while nevertheless refusing to reduce away the gap that is human subjectivity. Johnston argues for retooling

Freud Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in t ...

and Lacan after the success of the natural sciences in recent decades, while also arguing that Freud and Lacan presaged many of these successes. Johnston is critical of the thinkers of immanence whom he believes can only give us subjectless substance.

Bibliography

Adrian Johnston has published and co-edited a number of books, listed here. He is also a co-editor of the book series ''Diaeresis'' at Northwestern University Press. * ''Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive'' (

Northwestern University Press Northwestern University Press is an American publishing house affiliated with Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. It publishes 70 new titles each year in the areas of continental philosophy, poetry, Slavic and German literary criticis ...

, 2005) * ''Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity'' (Northwestern University Press, 2008) * ''Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change'' (Northwestern University Press, 2009) * ''Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume One: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy'' (Northwestern University Press, 2013) * ''Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience'' (Columbia University Press, 2013, with Catherine Malabou) * ''Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers'' (

Edinburgh University Press Edinburgh University Press is a scholarly publisher of academic books and journals, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. History Edinburgh University Press was founded in the 1940s and became a wholly owned subsidiary of the University of Edinburgh ...

, 2014, with Todd McGowan and

) * ''Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan’s ‘The Freudian Thing’ ''(

Palgrave Macmillan Palgrave Macmillan is a British academic and trade publishing company headquartered in the London Borough of Camden. Its programme includes textbooks, journals, monographs, professional and reference works in print and online. It maintains offi ...

, 2017) * ''A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical Materialism'' (

Columbia University Press Columbia University Press is a university press based in New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's la ...

, 2018) * ''Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume Two: A Weak Nature Alone'' (Northwestern University Press, 2019) * ''Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism'' (Ed.,

, 2022, with Boštjan Nedoh and Alenka Zupančič) * ''Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture) '' (Columbia University Press, 2024) * ''Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume Three: Substance Also as Subject'' (forthcoming) * ''God is Undead: Psychoanalysis Between Agnosticism and Atheism'' (forthcoming, with Lorenzo Chiesa)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Johnston, Adrian 21st-century American philosophers Critical theorists Freudo-Marxism Hegel scholars Jacques Lacan Living people Marxist theorists American Marxist writers University of New Mexico faculty Year of birth missing (living people)