Absolute Recoil

At the outset of the twentieth century, Lenin argued that materialism has to change its form with each new scientific discovery. Today, argues Slavoj Zizek in this major new work, we should apply this stricture to Lenin himself. Philosophical materialism has not yet risen to the challenge of relativity theory and quantum physics, or breakthroughs like Freudian psychoanalysis-and we need hardly mention the failure of actually existing Communism.
In Absolute Recoil, Zizek proposes a new foundation for dialectical materialism that answers these fundamental challenges.

“Praise for Slavoj”

The excitable fluency, ursine congeniality and gleeful readiness to provoke and offend all feed the sense of authentic sponanaeity and energy that has made Zizek somethig like European philosophy's punk icon, packing out auditoriums around the world. -- Josh Cohen New Statesman
Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than Slavoj Zizek ... one of the world's best-known public intellectuals. -- John Gray New York Review of Books
A gifted speaker-tumultuous, emphatic, direct-he writes as he speaks. -- Jonathan Rée Guardian
Like Socrates on steroids ... breathtakingly perceptive. -- Terry Eagleton

Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Less Than Nothing, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, six volumes of the Essential Zizek, and many more.

At the outset of the twentieth century, Lenin argued that materialism has to change its form with each new scientific discovery. Today, argues Slavoj Zizek in this major new work, we should apply this stricture to Lenin himself. Philosophical materialism has not yet risen to the challenge of relativity theory and quantum physics, or breakthroughs like Freudian psychoanalysis-and we need hardly mention the failure of actually existing Communism. In Absolute Recoil , Zizek proposes a new foundation for dialectical materialism that answers these fundamental challenges.

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