Hegel, Lacan, and Material Negativity
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ZRC SAZU Publishing (Znanstvenoraziskovalni center - Slovenske... Filozofski vestnik | Volume XXXIII | Number 2 | 2012 | 23–52 Adrian Johnston* Reflections of a Rotten Nature: Hegel, Lacan, and Material Negativity As I have underscored repeatedly in past texts,1 Jacques Lacan, despite his repu- tation as an avid anti-naturalist, has no qualms whatsoever about leaning upon certain ideas of nature as components of his theoretical apparatus.2 Although adamantly opposed to the introduction of a crudely reductive biologism as a grounding paradigm for psychoanalysis, he is not, for all that, categorically dis- missive of the life sciences. Once in a while, he even permits himself, like Freud, to voice hopes of eventual biological confirmations of analytic theories.3 To take just one illustration of this known to anyone familiar with Lacanianism, Lacan’s concept of “need” (besoin), as per the need-demand-desire triad, is bound up with the biological facticity of protracted infantile Hilflosigkeit, an anatomical and physiological “fact” of immense import for psychical ontogeny in the eyes of both Freud and Lacan.4 Arising immediately from the very start of the human 1 Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, Evan- ston: Northwestern University Press, 2008, pp. 269–287; Adrian Johnston, “Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian Reformation: Giving a Hearing to The Parallax View,” Diacritics: A Review of Con- temporary Criticism, vol. 37, no. 1, Spring 2007, pp. 3–20; Adrian Johnston, “The Weakness of Nature: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and Negativity Materialized,” Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, ed.
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