Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism

By Slavoj Žižek

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781781686836

Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek (Liubliana, 1949) estudió Filosofía en la Universidad de Liubliana y Psicoanálisis en la Universidad de París, y es filósofo, sociólogo, psicoanalista lacaniano, teórico cultural y activista político.  Es director internacional del Instituto Birkbeck para las Humanidades de la Universidad de Londres, investigador en el Instituto de Sociología de la Universidad de Liubliana y profesor en la European Graduate School. Es uno de los ensayistas más prestigiosos y leídos de la actualidad, autor de más de cuarenta libros de filosofía, cine, psicoanálisis, materialismo dialéctico y crítica de la ideología. En Anagrama ha publicado Mis chistes, mi filosofía, La nueva lucha de clases, Problemas en el paraíso, El coraje de la desesperanza, La vigencia de «El manifiesto comunista», Pandemia; Como un ladrón en pleno día y Incontinencia del vacío.

Reviews for Absolute Recoil

[jbarringer-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I think I liked some of the chapters in this book, or at least found the arguments entertaining to ponder, but it would take a lot longer to really unpack and understand each chapter before I could really say whether I agree with Zizek's conclusions, assumptions and reasoning. I enjoy that his philosophy is very much a glass bead game of popular books and films, mainstream religions and more obscure sources, tying together philosphy, music, literature, and science with lots of extra ornamentation to create a very modern-sounding philosophy. I found his essays in this book a bit more like practice puzzles, rather than practical philosophy, addressing sexuality, gender, and religious questions that are inherently masculine, and elitist, 'Western' masculine. Thus, while I can find the 'games' in his essays interesting and fun, they feel very artificial.

Granted, mainstream philosphy is Western and male in our current society, still, so of course it is not surprising that Zizek's book is addressing questions of sexuality that address 'female hysteria', and that generally approach sex from the heterosexual male perspective. At least there are nods toward an awareness in this book that the 'female' perspectives may differ a bit, but at least in this book, Zizek's philosophy is not one that I can easily internalize as personally resonant as a female reader, however much I might like some of Zizek's points. He did at least spend a whole paragraph or so discussing Ayn Rand's novel We The Living, which I appreciated. Maybe after I've found time to unpack these essays, watching, listening to, and reading all the sources he references and studying the philosophers he particularly addresses, I'll find his philosophy a bit less distancing.