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Sex and the Failed Absolute

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Sex and the Failed Absolute

By: Slavoj Žižek
Narrated by: Joe Jameson
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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.©2020 Slavoj Žižek (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Metaphysics Philosophy Political Science Politics & Government Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Society
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Critic reviews

[This] is certainly the best organized and clearly structured of the author's “big” books … Žižek'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.
Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than Slavoj Žižek.
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
The excitable fluency, ursine congeniality and gleeful readiness to provoke and offend all feed the sense of authentic sponanaeity and energy that has made Žižek somethig like European philosophy’s punk icon, packing out auditoriums around the world.
A gifted speaker—tumultuous, emphatic, direct—he writes as he speaks.
The most dangerous philosopher in the West
Žižek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation
A penetrating new study that redefines a term that most would be wary of returning to: dialectical materialism. What the feeling of déjà 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.
a relentless iconoclast, a restless wordsmith, an inventive thinker with a hatred of received wisdom, an underminer of conventionally acknowledged truths.
Sex and the Failed Absolute is to Žižek’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, Žižek offers readers the distilled essence of a new dialectical materialism. This reinvents the very foundations of Žižekian ontology
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