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:	9781350202412
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/25/2021
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	552,330
Product dimensions:	5.56(w) x 8.48(h) x 1.06(d)

About the Author

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 Space of Dialectical Materialism 1

Theorem I The Parallax of Ontology 17

Modalities of the Absolute 18

Reality and Its Transcendental Supplement 27

Varieties of the Transcendental in Western Marxism 41

The Margin of Radical Uncertainty 57

Corollary 1 Intellectual Intuition and Intellectus Archetypus: Reflexivity in Kant and Hegel 65

Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel 65

From Intellectus Ectypus to Intellectus Archetypus 75

Scholium 1.1 Buddha, Kant, Husserl 87

Scholium 1.2 Hegel's Parallax 97

Scholium 1.3 The "Death of Truth" 103

Theorem II Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute 107

Antinomies of Pure Sexuation 107

Sexual Parallax and Knowledge 119

The Sexed Subject 136

Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans 146

Corollary 2 Sinuosities of Sexualized Time 163

Days of the Living Dead 163

Cracks in Circular Time 178

Scholium 2.1 Schematism in Kant, Hegel … and Sex 193

Scholium 2.2 Marx, Brecht, and Sexual Contracts 199

Scholium 2.3 The Hegelian Repetition 209

Scholium 2.4 Seven Deadly Sins 215

Theorem III The Three Unorientables 219

Möbius Strip, or, the Convolutions of Concrete Universality 225

The "Inner Eight" 232

Suture Redoubled 239

Cross-Capping Class Struggle 245

From Cross-Cap to Klein Bottle 251

A Snout in Plato's Cave 259

Corollary 3 The Retarded God of Quantum Ontology 273

The Implications of Quantum Gravity 274

The Two Vacuums; From Less than Nothing to Nothing 291

Is the Collapse of a Quantum Wave Like a Throw of Dice? 301

Scholium 3.1 The Ethical Möbius Strip 309

Scholium 3.2 The Dark Tower of Suture 313

Scholium 3.3 Suture and Hegemony 317

Scholium 3.4 The World with(out) a Snout 319

Scholium 3.5 Towards a Quantum Platonism 333

Theorem IV The Persistence of Abstraction 343

Madness, Sex, War 343

How to Do Words with Things 351

The Inhuman View 359

The All-Too-Close in-Itself 372

Corollary 4 Ibi Rhodus Ibi Saltus! 387

The Protestant Freedom 388

Jumping Here and Jumping There 394

Four Ethical Gestures 403

Scholium 4.1 Language, Lalangue 429

Scholium 4.2 Prokofiev's Travels 441

Scholium 4.3 Beckett as the Writer of Abstraction 451

Index 459

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