Absolute Recoil : Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism

Zizek, Slavoj

ISBN 10: 1784781991 / ISBN 13: 9781784781996

Published by Verso, 2015

About this Item

Unread book in perfect condition.

Seller Inventory # 23872431

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Absolute Recoil : Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism
• Publisher: Verso
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1784781991
• ISBN 13: 9781784781996
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

A contemporary philosophical masterwork from “one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals ” (New York Review of Books)

Philosophical materialism in all its forms – from scientific naturalism to Deleuzian New Materialism – has failed to meet the key theoretical and political challenges of the modern world. This is the burden of philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s argument in this pathbreaking and eclectic new work. Recent history has seen developments such as quantum physics and Freudian psychoanalysis, not to speak of the failure of twentieth-century communism, shake our understanding of existence.

In the process, the dominant tradition in Western philosophy lost its moorings. To bring materialism up to date, Žižek – himself a committed materialist and communist – proposes a radical revision of our intellectual heritage. He argues that dialectical materialism is the only true philosophical inheritor of what Hegel designated the “speculative” approach in thought.

Absolute Recoil is a startling reformulation of the basis and possibilities of contemporary philosophy. While focusing on how to overcome the transcendental approach without regressing to naïve, pre-Kantian realism, Žižek offers a series of excursions into today’s political, artistic, and ideological landscape, from Arnold Schoenberg’s music to the films of Ernst Lubitsch.

About the Author

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Less Than Nothing; The Year of Dreaming Dangerously; Living in the End Times; First as Tragedy, Then as Farce; In Defense of Lost Causes; six volumes of the Essential Žižek; and many more.