Table Of ContentSPRINGER BRIEFS IN PHILOSOPHY
Charles William Johns
Neurosis and
Assimilation
Contemporary
Revisions on The
Life of the Concept
123
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Charles William Johns
Neurosis and Assimilation
Contemporary Revisions on The Life
of the Concept
123
CharlesWilliam Johns
LincolnUniversity
Lincoln
UK
ISSN 2211-4548 ISSN 2211-4556 (electronic)
SpringerBriefs inPhilosophy
ISBN978-3-319-47541-7 ISBN978-3-319-47542-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47542-4
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What People Are Saying About Neurosis
and Assimilation: Contemporary Revisions
on The Life of The Concept
This is a book that certainly breaks new ground for all of
literature, psychology and psychoanalysis, and
philosophy. Its thesis about neuroses is both novel and
interesting.
Leon Niemoczynski
Writer of the renowned blog After Nature and Professor
of Philosophy at Moravian College.
Johns’ debut book is not only interesting, it is an
intensification of thinking.
Leonard Lawlor, Sparks Professor of Philosophy Penn
State University (USA).
This is a compelling entry into the field of philosophical
literature that marks out Charles Johns as an exciting,
innovative and perspicacious thinker.
Nik Farrell Fox, author of The New Sartre (Continuum
Press, 2003).
Nobody likes to be neurotic; but neurosis is an
inescapable fact of our experience. Charles Johns thinks
through the consequences of this.
Steven Shaviro, author of Without Criteria: Kant,
Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press (2009) and The Universe of Things:
On Speculative Realism, Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press (2014).
Absolutely essential reading.
OKNO Magazine
A great project!
Adrian Johnston—Professor in the Department of
Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. Author of
Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism (Northwestern
University Press, 2013).
Foreword
Charles William Johns’ Neurosis and Assimilation: Contemporary Revisions on
The Life of The Concept is one of the finest philosophy books of the year—a gem
of the Anglo-American renaissance in continental philosophy.
Johns’workdoesnotneedjustification—itwouldsufficetoreaditinitsentirety,
todiscuss it,todiscretelypilferits ideas.Hegeldefinedthisdilemmamost clearly.
Forhowcanprefatorymaterialtrulycomplimentaworkwithoutcompromisingits
integrityasawhole?Formandcontentcalloutforadequation—anadequationthat
isnotnecessarilyenhancedbytrawlingthroughabook’scontentsandexhortingthe
reader to be enthusiastic.
However, this raises the question. For if Hegel believed that one could only do
disservice to a work by introducing it, why did he include introductory material in
all of his major works? The answer may lie in Bataille’s conception of “general
economy”:ofanexcess;ofanonrecuperablepartofaneconomythatmustbespent
knowingly and without gain—such as through war or artistic works. Bataille was
wrong about the altruistic nature of the expenditure of excess—a wrongness most
evident in his assessment of the altruism of the Marshall Plan. But shorn of this
assumption, the concept of “excess” can be seen as thoroughly dialectical. The
preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, while ostensibly disowning its own
function, nevertheless amounts to an admission of the necessity of such a gesture;
such a recompense for excess—whereby the vastness of a book’s contents is dis-
tilled and qualified. It is therefore the ultimate gesture of reflexive humility: an
acknowledgementthateveryintroductionisanapologyforitsauthor.Andbecause
every book is excessive, every book deserves one.
Thegoalofthisforeword,then,willnotbetoserveasapromotionaladdendum
for Johns’ book or to tediously reprise its contents point by point (it is not merely
“continental” philosophy). Instead, it will be torectify its excess—its fragmentary,
mercurialstructure—withoutbetrayingthatsameexcess,whichissoessentialtoits
uniqueness.
Whetherthisendeavourissuccessful,Johns—thephilosopherofassimilation—
would be better poised to answer. But it is a perk of working with an author so
vii
viii Foreword
steeped in questions that I don’t see, based on the philosophy he explicates here,
how he could have an answer…
ThecentralthemeofJohns’bookisneurosis.ThisisnottheneurosisofFreud—
the “substitute gratifications for unfulfilled sexual wishes”. Rather, for Johns,
neurosis refers to the way that we elect, consciously or not, to assimilate certain
symbols. The provocative example Johns provides—of a woman singing a pop
song while sipping her latte and texting, aware in a way of the sexuality of her
gestures—is adequately demonstrative. We find here that the woman in question
has neurotically assimilated herself to these gestures: the hushed mimicry of the
song’ssinger;therhythmicelevationofthecuptoherlips;thefrantic, syncopated
texting.
Thisneuroticassimilationdoesnotariseinthevacuumoftheindividualpsyche
but arises from the woman’s relationship to other entities (it is only useful, in the
context of Johns’ philosophy, to speak of subjects or objects heuristically—at
bottom, there is no place for such a distinction in his work): to her coffee cup, her
body, the song, the chair she’s sitting in.But like for Roman Ingarden, or Graham
Harman’seccentricHeidegger,Johnsinsiststhatintentionality—or,asheprefersto
call it, “assimilation”—is a two-way street. We assimilate objects, but objects also
assimilate us (and each other).
Assimilationisnotobjective—whenweassimilateobjects,orobjectsassimilate
us, there is always an interpretive dimension. The word “interpretive” here should
bequalified.Forobjectstoassimilate—andconsequently,interpret—oneanother,it
isnotnecessarythattheypossesspowersofcognition.Rather, itismerelythatthe
entity(objectorsubject)inquestionisnotexhaustedbyasingleencounter.WhenI
look at a coffee cup, it can also be seen from a virtually unending number of
different angles. Like for Harman, for Johns, entities never literally encounter one
another in their totality.
Johns’conceptionof“assimilation”isclearlyindebtedtothephenomenological
tradition. But he has reasons for utilizing the term instead of the more shopworn
“intentionality”. Edmund Husserl, in his later texts, veered towards an unexciting
blendofCartesianismandKantianism—amovewhichsparkedarevoltamongsthis
former students, while setting the stage for much of the decidedly idealist phe-
nomenology to follow. Against this, Johns rejects the idea of the bourgeois phi-
losophe,contemplatingobjectsfromthestandpointoftotalneutrality;constructing
reality with the dispassion of an accountant filing a tax report. And this rejection
oftheprivilegingofrationalagency,likeithasformanypoststructuralists,drawsits
inspiration from that most assimilated, and assimilatory, of all philosophers—
Nietzsche.
Following in a proud tradition of imaginative interpreters of Nietzsche, Johns’
develops his own, panpsychist edition of the German philosopher—one whose
“drives” are not merely psychic but rather constitutive of all relations between
entities. What past philosophers have called “objects” do not simply wait there,
politely cueing for humans to arrive on the scene and describe them. On the con-
trary,theyarethefirmamentfromwhichallrationalagency springs—theveryfact
that one can think is only the by-product of a contingent chain of materially
Foreword ix
dependent evolutionary events—which continue to constantly assail, even pup-
peteer,thesubject;effectivelyannullinganyclaimwehavetomentalindependence.
Does the woman, sipping her latte, choose the latte? Or did the latte—brought to
EnglandbyaneditoroftheAtlanticMonthly,andconspicuouslyadvertisedinwhite
lettering at the top of the café menu—choose her? Moreover, how will its daily
consumptionaffectherthought?Willithavelastingcognitiveimplications?Onecan
imagine a phenomenology of coffee. In this back and forth between “subject” and
“object”, this refusal to view human agency as divorced from its environment,
Johns’ work channels the sagacious philosophic achievements of Catherine
Malabou,whousedtheterm“plasticity”inherbookL’AvenirdeHegel—inwhich
shetradedtheNietzscheanlineagefortheHegelian—torefertotheconstancyofthis
interplay, which she designated asa latent featureof Hegel’sthought.
Johns’ channelling of Malabou points to a deeper source, however—that of
Aristotle. For it is Aristotle’s conception of “habit” [hexis]—in which we become
accustomed to the idea that A goes to B to C—that Hegel deploys, in the
Anthropology section of the Philosophy of Spirit, as the foundation of the
self-knowledge obtained above and beyond Logic and Nature (a contrast with
the more conventional view of language as the locus of human self-knowledge).
As Malabou observes, though, Hegel puts forth a particular “reading” of
Aristotle—one in which Aristotle’s description of the assimilation of objects to
sense actually changes the perceptual apparatus in question:
Generally,aboutallperception,wecansaythatasenseiswhathasthepowerofreceiving
intoitselfthesensibleformsofthingswithoutthematter,inthewayinwhichapieceof
wax takes on the impress of a signet ring without the iron or gold; what produces the
impressionisasignetofbronzeorgold,butnotquabronzeorgold:inasimilarwaythe
senseisaffectedbywhatiscolouredorflavouredorsoundingnotinsofaraseachiswhatit
is,butinsofarasitisofsuchandsuchasortandaccordingtoitsform.
Habit—or hexis in Ancient Greek—is the basis of the human acquisition of
knowledge and exercise of choice, as distinct from the merely instinctual or
organic. And this faculty is not restricted to humans: animals also demonstrate a
limitedcapacitytoexercisecognitivechoicewithrespecttotheirsurroundings.But
in Hegel’s reading of Aristotle, these habits, having been adopted, actually change
theiradoptee.Andwhileconvenient,habitscanalsobedeceiving—theycauseusto
omit information as a means of expediting our adaptive process.
Whatismostimportanttodistilfromtheexegesisabove—onewhichmaybeof
more interest to the “anoraks” Johns purports to be inspired by is that, in the
Nietzschean-HegeliantraditionJohnssubscribesto,objects(whetherrealorfictive)
are never innocent. They always threaten to upend the world; to assimilate it. And
neurosisisthefusewhichdrives,anddirects,theirinteraction.Thethrustofhuman
history, moving it as it has towards the “nonnatural” domain described by Johns,
only radicalizes the complexity of our interaction with objects, requiring us to
marshal our neuroses as never before. We are living in the neurotic age.
