The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters - Hardcover

Zizek, Slavoj

9781859849590: The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1859849598 ISBN 13: 9781859849590

Publisher: Verso Books, 1996

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The feature which distinguishes the great works of materialist thought, from Lucretius's "De Rerum Natura" through "Das Capital" to the writings of Lacan, is their unfinished character: again and again they tackle their chosen problem. Schelling's "Weltalter" drafts belong to this same series, with their repeated attempt at the formulation of the "beginning of the world", of the passage from the pre-symbolic pulsation of the "real" to the universe of logos. F.W.J. Schelling, the German idealist who for too long dwelled in the shadow of Kant and Hegel, was the first to formulate the post-idealist motifs of finitude, contingency and temporality. His unique work announces Marx's critique of speculative idealism, as well as the properly Freudian notion of drive, of a blind compulsion to repeat that which can never be sublated in the ideal medium of language. This work begins with a detailed examination of the two works in which Schelling's speculative audacity reached its peak: his essay on human freedom and his drafts on the "Ages of the World". After reconstituting their lines of argumentation, Slavoj Zizek confronts Schelling with Hegel, and concludes by throwing a Schellingian light on some "related matters": the consequences of the computerization of daily life for sexual experience; cynicism as today's predominant form of ideology; and the epistemological deadlocks of quantum physics. Although the book contains many examples from politics and popular culture - very much Zizek's style - from "Speed" and "Groundhog Day" to "Forrest Gump", it signals a major shift towards a systematic concern with the basic questions of philosophy and the roots of the crisis of our late-capitalist universe, centred around the enigma of modern subjectivity. Slavoj Zizek is the author of "The Sublime Object of Ideology", "For They Know Not What They Do", "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)", "Enjoy Your Symptom!" and "The Metastases of Enjoyment".

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Review

" i ek leaves no social or natural phenomenon untheorized, and is a master of the counter-intuitive observation."--"New Yorker""The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in some decades."--Terry Eagleton"The Elvis of cultural theory."--"Chronicle of Higher Education"

About the Author

Slavoj i ek 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 "Living in the End Times," "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce," "In Defense of Lost Causes," four volumes of the Essential i ek, and many more.

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