Reimagining the Atom: Badiou, Hegel, Žižek

PSYCHOANALYTIC PRACTICES

SPEAKER: Katherine Everitt, European Graduate School

The atom represents one of the oldest paradoxes in the history of thought. Can the material world be broken down into discreet, indivisible units, or can we divide the world into infinitely smaller pieces? In the classical sense, the atom is meant to be the ground floor of nature, the final building block upon which all of materiality stands. Thus, the atom raises a series of difficult questions for thinkers. What is nature in-itself? Is it simply that thinking subjects have imposed order onto a chaotic nature, or does nature have some organizing principles in the form of laws and inherent taxonomies? The question of how thought weaves into nature is the focus of this talk. The rigorous ontological systems of Badiou and Hegel and the recent work on quantum physics by Žižek are compared in their renderings of “the nature of nature.” To this purpose, the atom serves as the focal point at which the imagination weaves into nature, presenting itself as the infinitesimal intersection between idealism and materialism.