Sex and the Failed Absolute

by Slavoj Zizek

Overview

In the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical system to date, Slavoj Žižek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism.

In forging this new materialism, Žižek 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, Žižek 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 Žižek at his interrogative best.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350043794
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	09/19/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	496
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Slavoj Žižek is one of the world's leading contemporary cultural critics and a hugely prolific author. He is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, UK, and Visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research, New York, USA.
Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, and a Communist. He is International Director at the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities, University of London, UK, Visiting Professor at the New York University, USA, and Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: THE UNORIENTABLE SURFACE OF DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM

THEOREM I: THE PARALLAX OF ONTOLOGY
Modalities 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 HEGEL
Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel-From Intellectus Ectypus to Intellectus Archetypus

SCHOLIUM 1.1: BUDDHA, KANT, HUSSERL
SCHOLIUM 1.2: HEGEL'S PARALLAX
SCHOLIUM 1.3: THE “DEATH OF TRUTH”

THEOREM II: SEX AS OUR BRUSH WITH THE ABSOLUTE
Antinomies of Pure Sexuation-Sexual Parallax and Knowledge-The Sexed Subject - Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans

COROLLARY 2: SINUOSITIES OF SEXUALIZED TIME
Days of the Living Dead – Cracks in Circular Time

SCHOLIUM 2.1: SCHEMATISM IN KANT, HEGEL… AND SEX
SCHOLIUM 2.2: MARX, BRECHT, AND SEXUAL CONTRACTS
SCHOLIUM 2.3: THE HEGELIAN REPETITION
SCHOLIUM 2.4: SEVEN DEADLY SINS

THEOREM III: THE THREE UNORIENTABLES
Möbius 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 ONTOLOGY
The 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 STRIP
SCHOLIUM 3.2: THE DARK TOWER OF SUTURE
SCHOLIUM 3.3: SUTURE AND HEGEMONY
SCHOLIUM 3.4: THE WORLD WITH(OUT) A SNOUT
SCHOLIUM 3.5: TOWARDS A QUANTUM PLATONISM

THEOREM IV: THE PERSISTENCE OF ABSTRACTION
Madness, 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, LALANGUE
SCHOLIUM 4.2 - PROKOFIEV'S TRAVELS
SCHOLIUM 4.3: BECKETT AS THE WRITER OF ABSTRACTION

Editorial Reviews

[This] is certainly the best organized and clearly structured of the author's “big” books … Žižek'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

“Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than Slavoj Žižek.” —John Gray, New York Review of Books

“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” —Terry Eagleton

“The excitable fluency, ursine congeniality and gleeful readiness to provoke and offend all feed the sense of authentic sponanaeity and energy that has made Žižek somethig like European philosophy's punk icon, packing out auditoriums around the world.” —Josh Cohen, New Statesman

“A gifted speaker-tumultuous, emphatic, direct-he writes as he speaks.” —Jonathan Rée, Guardian

“The most dangerous philosopher in the West” —Adam Kirsch, New Republic

“Žižek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation” —New Yorker

“A penetrating new study that redefines a term that most would be wary of returbaning 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.” —Scottish Left Review

“a relentless iconoclast, a restless wordsmith, an inventive thinker with a hatred of received wisdom, an underminer of conventionally acknowledged truths.” —Bookforum

“Sex and the Failed Absolute is to Žižek'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, Žižek offers readers the distilled essence of a new dialectical materialism. This reinvents the very foundations of Žižekian ontology” —Adrian Johnston, Professor and Chair of Philosophy, University of New Mexico, U.S.A

From the Publisher