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 Mobius 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.

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

Vorwort
Slavoj Zizek establishes a new definition of materialism critiquing everybody from Kant and Hegel to Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux along the way

Autorentext

Slavoj Zizek 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.

Inhalt

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