Description

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 Zizek 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, Zizek – 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, Zizek offers a series of excursions into today s political, artistic, and ideological landscape, from Arnold Schoenberg s music to the films of Ernst Lubitsch.