Sex and the Failed Absolute

(Paperback)

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Description

In the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical system to date, Slavoj iek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism. In forging this new materialism, iek 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 Mbius strip, the cross-cap, and the Klein bottle, iek 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 iek at his interrogative best.

Reviews

[This] is certainly the best organized and clearly structured of the author's big books iek'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. * CHOICE *
Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than Slavoj iek. * John Gray, New York Review of Books *
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 * Terry Eagleton *
The excitable fluency, ursine congeniality and gleeful readiness to provoke and offend all feed the sense of authentic sponanaeity and energy that has made iek somethig like European philosophys punk icon, packing out auditoriums around the world. * Josh Cohen, New Statesman *
A gifted speakertumultuous, emphatic, directhe writes as he speaks. * Jonathan Re, Guardian *
The most dangerous philosopher in the West * Adam Kirsch, New Republic *
iek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation * New Yorker *
A penetrating new study that redefines a term that most would be wary of returning to: dialectical materialism. What the feeling of dj 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. * Scottish Left Review *
a relentless iconoclast, a restless wordsmith, an inventive thinker with a hatred of received wisdom, an underminer of conventionally acknowledged truths. * Bookforum *
Sex and the Failed Absolute is to ieks corpus what Malevichs Black Square was to his artistic oeuvre. In this watershed book, interweaving the odd couple of quantum physics and sexuality, iek offers readers the distilled essence of a new dialectical materialism. This reinvents the very foundations of iekian ontology * Adrian Johnston, Professor and Chair of Philosophy, University of New Mexico, U.S.A *

Author Bio

Slavoj iek is a Hegelian philosopher, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, and a Communist. He is International Director at the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities, University of London, UK, Visiting Professor at the New York University, USA, and Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.