Panpsychism

Panpsychism, as it appears in Johnston's contribution to the Žižek-responds volume, names a theoretical danger-zone rather than an endorsed position: the risk that any materialist ontology runs when it attributes proto-subjective or proto-experiential properties to the lowest level of physical reality. Johnston invokes the term critically, as a diagnostic label for what happens when the "zero-level" of matter is treated as already tinged with subjectivity or interiority. In the context of the Žižek–Johnston debate, this charge is directed at the Schellingian strand of Žižek's quantum metaphysics: if quantum indeterminacy or the "barred" nature of the Real at the physical ground-floor is read as proto-subjective, the result converges—despite dialectical-materialist intentions—with spiritualist panpsychism, the philosophical doctrine that mind or experience is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.

The theoretical move Johnston is executing here is structural. He argues that Žižek's preference for quantum physics as the scientific partner for materialist philosophy, and his deployment of a Schellingian "layer-doughnut" model of emergence (in which the highest level of spirit and the lowest level of natura naturans circularly interpenetrate), smuggles in precisely the kind of continuity between matter and subjectivity that dialectical materialism must refuse. Hegel's "layer-cake" model of emergence, by contrast, preserves strict differences-in-kind between levels through sublation, blocking any direct read-back of higher-level properties (subjectivity, experience) onto lower-level substrates. Panpsychism thus marks the limit-point where Schellingian naturphilosophie and Hegelian dialectics diverge: one risks collapsing that limit, the other enforces it.

This concept appears once, in todd-mcgowan-dominik-finkelde-eds-zizek-responds-bloomsbury-publishing-2022, as a critical term within Johnston's polemic against the Schellingian dimension of Žižek's materialism. It is best understood as a boundary concept—a name for the theoretical failure-mode that the argument is designed to forestall. It cross-references the corpus's rich treatment of Emergence (specifically the Layer-Cake vs. Layer-Doughnut models), Dialectics, and the Real. With respect to Dialectics, panpsychism represents what dialectical materialism must exclude: the premature reconciliation of matter and subject at the ground-floor of ontology, short-circuiting the discontinuous, sublating movement that Hegelian dialectics (in its layer-cake form) insists upon. Where dialectics preserves differences-in-kind through negation, panpsychism smooths them away into a continuum of proto-experience.

With respect to Phenomenology, there is an indirect but structurally resonant relationship: just as Lacan's critique of phenomenology identifies it as a framework that privileges continuity of sense and lived experience over the radical cut of the signifier, Johnston's critique of panpsychism identifies it as a framework that privileges continuity between matter and subjectivity over the emergence of genuinely new ontological levels. Both phenomenology and panpsychism, from this critical standpoint, fail to honor the irreducibility of rupture—the Lacanian and Hegelian insistence that the subject is not simply latent in what precedes it, but arises through a discontinuous break. The concept of the Real is also implicated: reading quantum indeterminacy as proto-subjective aestheticizes or spiritualizes the Real's opacity, rather than holding it as a strictly non-subjective remainder that resists symbolization.

Žižek Responds!Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · 2022 (page unknown)

Treating the zero-level of the physical universe as proto-subjective threatens to run contrary to materialism… by lending credence to spiritualist panpsychism.

The phrase "zero-level of the physical universe as proto-subjective" is theoretically loaded because it names the precise ontological gesture Johnston objects to: assigning subjectivity not as an emergent property but as a ground-floor attribute, thereby collapsing the very distinction between matter and subject that materialist dialectics depends on. The modifier "spiritualist" before "panpsychism" is equally charged—it signals that this is not merely a metaphysical error but a regression to a pre-materialist, idealist or vitalist framework that dialectical materialism defines itself against.