Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism

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 €œspeculative€ 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 na¯ve, 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.