Sex and the Failed Absolute

Description

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. Contents......Page 8 Introduction The Unorientable Space of Dialectical Materialism......Page 12 Notes......Page 25 Theorem I The Parallax of Ontology......Page 28 Modalities of the Absolute......Page 29 Reality and Its Transcendental Supplement......Page 38 Varieties of the Transcendental in Western Marxism......Page 52 The Margin of Radical Uncertainty......Page 68 Notes......Page 73 Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel......Page 76 From Intellectus Ectypus toIntellectus Archetypus......Page 86 Notes......Page 95 Scholium 1.1 Buddha, Kant, Husserl......Page 98 Notes......Page 107 Scholium 1.2 Hegel’s Parallax......Page 108 Notes......Page 113 Scholium 1.3 The “Death of Truth”......Page 114 Antinomies of Pure Sexuation......Page 118 Sexual Parallax and Knowledge......Page 130 The Sexed Subject......Page 147 Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans......Page 157 Notes......Page 170 Days of the Living Dead......Page 174 Cracks in Circular Time......Page 189 Notes......Page 201 Scholium 2.1 Schematism in Kant, Hegel . . . and Sex......Page 204 Notes......Page 209 Scholium 2.2 Marx, Brecht, and Sexual Contracts......Page 210 Notes......Page 218 Scholium 2.3 The Hegelian Repetition......Page 220 Notes......Page 224 Scholium 2.4 Seven Deadly Sins......Page 226 Note......Page 228 Theorem III The Three Unorientables......Page 230 Möbius Strip, or, the Convolutions of Concrete Universality......Page 236 The “Inner Eight”......Page 243 Suture Redoubled......Page 250 Cross-Capping Class Struggle......Page 256 From Cross-Cap to Klein Bottle......Page 262 A Snout in Plato’s Cave......Page 270 Notes......Page 280 Corollary 3 The Retarded God of Quantum Ontology......Page 284 The Implications of Quantum Gravity......Page 285 The Two Vacuums: From Less than Nothing to Nothing......Page 302 Is the Collapse of a Quantum Wave Like a Throw of Dice?......Page 312 Notes......Page 317 Scholium 3.1 The Ethical Möbius Strip......Page 320 Note......Page 323 Scholium 3.2 The Dark Tower of Suture......Page 324 Note......Page 326 Scholium 3.3 Suture and Hegemony......Page 328 Scholium 3.4 The World With(out) a Snout......Page 330 Notes......Page 342 Scholium 3.5 Towards a Quantum Platonism......Page 344 Notes......Page 352 Madness, Sex, War......Page 354 How to Do Words with Things......Page 362 The Inhuman View......Page 370 The All-Too-Close In-Itself......Page 383 Notes......Page 394 Corollary 4 Ibi Rhodus Ibi Saltus!......Page 398 The Protestant Freedom......Page 399 Jumping Here and Jumping There......Page 405 Four Ethical Gestures......Page 414 Notes......Page 437 Scholium 4.1 Language, Lalangue......Page 440 Notes......Page 450 Scholium 4.2 Prokofiev’s Travels......Page 452 Notes......Page 460 Scholium 4.3 Beckett as the Writer of Abstraction......Page 462 Notes......Page 469 Index......Page 470