Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Materialism

✍ Scribed by Agon Hamza; Frank Ruda

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book is the first volume to bring together the most prominent scholars who work on Slavoj Žižek's philosophy, examining and interrogating his understanding of dialectical materialism. It deserves to be thoroughly and systematically elaborated because it attempts to propose a new foundation for dialectical materialism.

"A brilliant collection of essays not only on Žižek's most recent work, but on dialectical thought as such." —Fabio Vighi, Professor of Italian and Critical Theory and Co-director of the Žižek Centre for Ideology Critique, Cardiff University, UK

Agon Hamza is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana, Slovenia. With Slavoj Žižek, he is the coauthor of From Myth to Symptom: The Case of Kosovo.

Frank Ruda is an interim professor for the philosophy of audiovisual media at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, and a visiting lecturer at Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is the author of Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism.

Slavoj Žižek is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of many books, including Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: The Absolute Revisited—Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Materialism
Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda
Notes
2. Materialism without Materialism: Slavoj Žižek and the Disappearance of Matter
Adrian Johnston
Notes
Bibliography
3. The Althusserian Battlegrounds
Robert Pfaller
Answering or Treating the Philosophical Questions?
The Unbelievable and the Material
The Visible, the Invisible, and the Non-Existent Tanks
The Knees and the Subjects
The Meaningless and the Meaning
Three Althusserian Subjectivities
Notes
Bibliography
4. The Necessity of an Absolute Misunderstanding: Why Hegel Has So Many Misreaders
Todd McGowan
“Even He Did Not Understand Me”
The Difficulty of Contradicting Oneself
A Totality That Undermines Itself
Emancipation from Resolution
Notes
Bibliography
5. From Hegel to Kant: The Thing-of-Itself German Idealism
Jan Voelker
Notes
Bibliography
6. Politics of Negativity in Slavoj Žižek: Actualizing Some Hegelian Themes
Vladimir Safatle
Negation as a Political Act
What Does Desire Really Lack of?
Passion for the Real and Critic of Ideology
Notes
Bibliography
7. Dialectic at Its Impurest: Žižek’s Materialism of Less Than Nothing
Simon Hajdini
Notes
Bibliography
8. Natural Worlds, Historical Worlds, and Dialectical Materialism
Ed Pluth
Notes
Bibliography
9. Positing the Presuppositions—Dialectical Biology and the Minimal Structure of Life
Victor Marques
The Organism and the Possibility of Freedom
Varela and Dialectical Biology
Infinity and Strange Loops
Dialectical Materialism and the Genesis of the Subject
Notes
Bibliography
10. Transferential Materialism: Toward a Theory of Formal Otherness
Gabriel Tupinambá
The Dialectics of Generalization and Regionalization
Existence and Expression in the Transferential Relation
The “One” and the Subject Supposed to Know
A General Theory of Formal Otherness
Notes
Bibliography
11. Dialectical Materialism and the Dangers of Aristotelianism
Frank Ruda
Performative Contradiction? Yes, Please!
The Black Sun of Dialectical Materialism
The Danger of Transcendental Fuckedupness
Where Do Norms Come From?
Notes
Bibliography
12. Going to One’s Ground: Žižek’s Dialectical Materialism
Agon Hamza
Dialectical Framework
Return as a Repetition
Žižek, Our Hegel
Notes
Bibliography
13. Afterword: Objects, Objects Everywhere
Slavoj Žižek
Notes
Notes on Contributors
Index