ReviewsThe excitable fluency, ursine congeniality and gleeful readiness to provoke and offend all feed the sense of authentic sponanaeity and energy that has made zizek somethig like European philosophy's punk icon, packing out auditoriums around the world., Like Socrates on steroids ... breathtakingly perceptive.The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in many decades, A penetrating new study that redefines a term that most would be wary of returning to: dialectical materialism. What the feeling of déjà vu in reading Sex and the Failed Absolute does come from is the re-experiencing of the excitement that characterised reading his first book back in 1989., "[This] is certainly the best organized and clearly structured of the author's "big" books ... Z?iz?ek's writing style is much clearer (relatively speaking) than it was in earlier works and thus reflects the fact that many careless readers have (mis)read him simplistically ... Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." - CHOICE, Sex and the Failed Absolute is to zizek's corpus what Malevich's Black Square was to his artistic oeuvre . In this watershed book, interweaving the odd couple of quantum physics and sexuality, zizek offers readers the distilled essence of a new dialectical materialism. This reinvents the very foundations of zizekian ontology, [This] is certainly the best organized and clearly structured of the author's "big" books ... Z?iz?ek's writing style is much clearer (relatively speaking) than it was in earlier works and thus reflects the fact that many careless readers have (mis)read him simplistically ... Summing Up: Highly recommended., zizek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation, a relentless iconoclast, a restless wordsmith, an inventive thinker with a hatred of received wisdom, an underminer of conventionally acknowledged truths., [This] is certainly the best organized and clearly structured of the author's "big" books ... Z?iz?ek's writing style is much clearer (relatively speaking) than it was in earlier works and thus reflects the fact that many careless readers have (mis)read him simplistically ... Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.
Table Of ContentINTRODUCTION: THE UNORIENTABLE SURFACE OF DIALECTICAL MATERIALISMTHEOREM I: THE PARALLAX OF ONTOLOGYModalities of the Absolute--Reality and Its Transcendental Supplement - Varieties of the Transcendental in Western Marxism - The Margin of Radical Uncertainty COROLLARY 1: INTELLECTUAL INTUITION AND INTELLECTUS ARCHETYPUS: REFLEXIVITY IN KANT AND HEGELIntellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel--From Intellectus Ectypus to Intellectus Archetypus SCHOLIUM 1.1: BUDDHA, KANT, HUSSERLSCHOLIUM 1.2: HEGEL'S PARALLAXSCHOLIUM 1.3: THE "DEATH OF TRUTH" THEOREM II: SEX AS OUR BRUSH WITH THE ABSOLUTEAntinomies of Pure Sexuation--Sexual Parallax and Knowledge--The Sexed Subject - Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans COROLLARY 2: SINUOSITIES OF SEXUALIZED TIMEDays of the Living Dead - Cracks in Circular Time SCHOLIUM 2.1: SCHEMATISM IN KANT, HEGEL... AND SEXSCHOLIUM 2.2: MARX, BRECHT, AND SEXUAL CONTRACTSSCHOLIUM 2.3: THE HEGELIAN REPETITIONSCHOLIUM 2.4: SEVEN DEADLY SINS THEOREM III: THE THREE UNORIENTABLESMöbius Strip, or, the Convolutions of Concrete Universality--The "Inner Eight"--(((Suture Redoubled)))--Cross-Capping Class Struggle--From Cross-Cap to Klein Bottle--A Snout in Plato's Cave COROLLARY 3: THE RETARDED GOD OF QUANTUM ONTOLOGYThe Implications of Quantum Gravity--The Two Vacuums: From Less than Nothing to Nothing - Is the Collapse of a Quantum Wave Like a Throw of Dice? SCHOLIUM 3.1: THE ETHICAL MOEBIUS STRIPSCHOLIUM 3.2: THE DARK TOWER OF SUTURESCHOLIUM 3.3: SUTURE AND HEGEMONYSCHOLIUM 3.4: THE WORLD WITH(OUT) A SNOUTSCHOLIUM 3.5: TOWARDS A QUANTUM PLATONISM THEOREM IV: THE PERSISTENCE OF ABSTRACTIONMadness, Sex, War-- How to Do Words with Things--The Inhuman View - The All-Too-Close In-Itself COROLLARY 4: IBI RHODUS IBI SALTUS!The Protestant Freedom--Jumping Here and Jumping There--Four Ethical Gestures SCHOLIUM 4.1: LANGUAGE, LALANGUESCHOLIUM 4.2 - PROKOFIEV'S TRAVELSSCHOLIUM 4.3: BECKETT AS THE WRITER OF ABSTRACTION
SynopsisIn the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical system to date, Slavoj Zizek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism. In forging this new materialism, Zizek critiques and challenges not only the work of Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux, and Julia Kristeva (to name but a few), but everything from popular science and quantum mechanics to sexual difference and analytic philosophy. Alongside striking images of the M bius strip, the cross-cap, and the Klein bottle, Zizek brings alive the Hegelian triad of being-essence-notion. Radical new readings of Hegel, and Kant, sit side by side with characteristically lively commentaries on film, politics, and culture. Here is Zizek at his interrogative best., In the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical system to date, Slavoj zizek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism.In forging this new materialism, zizek critiques and challenges not only the work of Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux, and Julia Kristeva (to name but a few), but everything from popular science and quantum mechanics to sexual difference and analytic philosophy. Alongside striking images of the Möbius strip, the cross-cap, and the Klein bottle, zizek brings alive the Hegelian triad of being-essence-notion. Radical new readings of Hegel, and Kant, sit side by side with characteristically lively commentaries on film, politics, and culture.Here is zizek at his interrogative best.
LC Classification NumberB4870.Z593