Sex and the Failed Absolute

Description

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 Moebius 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.

Slavoj Zizek 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.

[This] is certainly the best organized and clearly structured of the author's "big" books ... Zizek'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 Zizek. * 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 Zizek 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 Ree, Guardian * The most dangerous philosopher in the West * Adam Kirsch, New Republic * Zizek 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 returning to: dialectical materialism. What the feeling of deja 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 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 * Adrian Johnston, Professor and Chair of Philosophy, University of New Mexico, U.S.A *