Authors: Slavoj Zizek
ISBN-13: 9780262512688, ISBN-10: 0262512688
Format: Paperback
Publisher: MIT Press
Date Published: April 2009
Edition: Reprint
Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher and cultural critic. He has published over thirty books, including Looking Awry, The Puppet and the Dwarf, and The Parallax View (these three published by the MIT Press).
In Žižek's long-awaited magnum opus, he theorizes the "parallax gap" in the ontological, the scientific, and the political—and rehabilitates dialectical materialism.
A Lacanian-Hegelian philosopher and pop culture critic who divides his time between America and Slovenia, Zizek is one of the few living writers to combine theoretical rigor with compulsive readability, and his new volume provides perhaps the clearest elaboration of his theoretical framework thus far. Expatiating on such subjects as Heidegger, neuroscience, the war on terror and The Matrix, he seeks to rehabilitate dialectical materialism by replacing the popular "yin-yang" interpretation (the struggle between opposites that ultimately form a whole) with a theory of the "gap which separates the One from itself." One example is a tribe whose two subgroups draw mutually exclusive plans of their village: their deadlock "implies a hidden reference to a constant... an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole." Discussing Abu Ghraib and pedophilia in the Catholic Church, Zizek explores how an ideological edifice is sustained by underground transgressions: "Law can be sustained only by a sovereign power which reserves for itself the right... to suspend the rule of law(s) on behalf of the Law itself." Based on his interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, he envisions a society in which public law would no longer sustain itself through its own obscene breach. This challenging book takes us on a roller-coaster ride whose every loop is a Mobius strip. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Introduction : dialectical materialism at the gates | 2 | |
I | The stellar parallax : the traps of ontological difference | 15 |
1 | The subject, this "inwardly circumcised Jew" | 16 |
2 | Building blocks for a materialist theology | 68 |
Interlude 1 : Kate's choice, or, the materialism of Henry James | 124 | |
II | The solar parallax : the unbearable lightness of being no one | 145 |
3 | The unbearable heaviness of being divine shit | 146 |
4 | The loop of freedom | 200 |
Interlude 2 : objet petit a in social links, or, the impasses of anti-anti-Semitism | 252 | |
III | The lunar parallax : toward a politics of subtraction | 271 |
5 | From surplus-value to surplus-power | 272 |
6 | The obscene knot of ideology, and how to untie it | 330 |