Absolute Recoil

By: Slavoj Zizek

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Synopsis: 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 i ek'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, i ek - 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, i ek offers a series of excursions into today's political, artistic, and ideological landscape, from Arnold Schoenberg's music to the films of Ernst Lubitsch.From the Hardcover edition.