School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemNot Nearly Wrong Enough: Epistemontology as an Analogical Re-fusion of Real Abstraction(University of Minnesota Press, 2021-06-01)For the past two decades A. Kiarina Kordela has been working on a singular and difficult synthesis of Benedict Spinoza, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. Her attempt is to construct a new form of historical materialism, transforming it into a rigorous monism for which the exemplarily modern--let's say, the seventeenth century--distinction between epistemology and ontology would no longer be able to be considered real. As Kordela puts it on the first page of her new, challenging book: "In spite of the incommensurable difference between ideas and things, their relations share the same structures, and both, ideas and things, express the same substance or being" (2018,1). Kordela gives two names to that substance which is expressed in the "parallelism" or "homology" of words and things: "structurality" (3) and the "unconscious" (2). The unconscious, then, is not simply a name for non-conscious mental processes or just an a-topic or ex-static locus established by the non-natural fact of language. It is the key support for any account of a "self-actualizing" universe at once secular, rationally accessible, yet without reduction to the concept. It is ultimately Kordela's commitment to a special kind of speculative psychoanalysis that links Marx to Spinoza and allows her to rebind philosophy with politics with psychology and that will reinstate in full ambition the powers of philosophy for our apocalyptic present age.