Adrian Johnston

Adrian Johnston (born 1961) is a British musician and composer for film and TV who resides in London and Samois-sur-Seine. Born in Cumbria, England, Johnston attended Edinburgh University, reading English. He has been a drummer in bands including Moles for Breakfast, The Waterboys, the Wanglers, Combo Zombo, and The Mike Flowers Pops. During his twenties, he travelled the world providing music accompaniment to silent films at film festivals. He later scored productions for the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Johnston's first film score was for the 1996 Thomas Hardy adaptation Jude. He has also composed original scores for Becoming Jane, a 2007 film about Jane Austen, and the 2008 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. In 2008, he was awarded a BAFTA for the score of the BBC film Capturing Mary.

Johnston's score for Charles Sturridge's mini-series Shackleton won a 2002 Primetime Emmy. In 2009, he scored the British science-fiction procedural TV series Paradox. He composed the theme music for the BBC detective series Zen, which won him a 2011 RTS Awards; the World War II drama The Sinking of the Laconia; Stephen Poliakoff's acclaimed 2013 TV series Dancing on the Edge; and the drama The 7.39. Johnston won another RTS award in 2014 for scoring The Tunnel.

Adrian Johnston (philosopher)

Adrian Johnston is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta.

Johnston is one of the most widely followed philosophers writing today. Influenced by Žižek and his readings of German idealism, Johnston’s work has gained many readers among those making the materialist and realist turns in Continental philosophy. Johnston’s books are guided by his “transcendental materialism,” which in sum calls for a materialist ontology that nevertheless does not reduce away the gap or figure that is human subjectivity. Johnston argues for retooling Freud and Lacan after the success of the natural sciences in recent decades, but argues that both Freud and Lacan presaged a lot of these successes. Critical of the thinkers of immanence whom he believes, following Hegel, can only give us subjectless substance, Johnston’s work has brought Lacanianism into the 21st century when many wrongly claimed it dead long before the end of the last.