From Transcendental Materialism to Critical-Dialectical Naturalism

On 28 May at 5 pm, the Institute of Philosophy and the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU will host Adrian Johnston from the University of New Mexico.

In his lecture, Johnston will address a fundamental tension at the core of his philosophical project: how to reconcile transcendental philosophy, concerned with the conditions of subjectivity and cognition, with a materialism grounded in nature and the sciences. Conceived also as a programmatic outline for the further development of his thought, the lecture will draw on German Idealism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and contemporary philosophy of science in order to explore what Johnston calls “critical-dialectical naturalism” — a materialism of a self-denaturalising nature that radically alters itself in and through its human offspring.

Adrian Johnston is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. He is the author of numerous influential works, including Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (2005), Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (2008), Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations (2009), and A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical Materialism (2018). His most recent books are Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital (2024) and, with Lorenzo Chiesa, God Is Undead: Psychoanalysis for Unbelievers (2025).