The Parallax View

by Zizek, Slavoj

• ISBN13: 9780262512688
• ISBN10: 0262512688
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-02-13
• Publisher: The MIT Press

Summary

The Parallax Viewis Slavoj Zizek's most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years; Zizek himself describes it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Zizek is interested in the "parallax gap" separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an "impossible short circuit" of levels that can never meet. From this consideration of parallax, Zizek begins a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism. Modes of parallax can be seen in different domains of today's theory, from the wave-particle duality in quantum physics to the parallax of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis between interpretations of the formation of the unconscious and theories of drives. In The Parallax View, Zizek, with his usual astonishing erudition, focuses on three main modes of parallax: the ontological difference, the ultimate parallax that conditions our very access to reality; the scientific parallax, the irreducible gap between the phenomenal experience of reality and its scientific explanation, which reaches its apogee in today's brain sciences (according to which "nobody is home" in the skull, just stacks of brain meat-a condition Zizek calls "the unbearable lightness of being no one"); and the political parallax, the social antagonism that allows for no common ground. Between his discussions of these three modes, Zizek offers interludes that deal with more specific topics-including an ethical act in a novel by Henry James and anti-anti-Semitism. The Parallax Viewnot only expands Zizek's Lacanian-Hegelian approach to new domains (notably cognitive brain sciences) but also provides the systematic exposition of the conceptual framework that underlies his entire work. Philosophical and theological analysis, detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music coexist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes. Short Circuits series

Author Biography

Slavoj Žižek, a philosopher and cultural critic, is Senior Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. He is the author of more than thirty books, including Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, The Parallax View, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (with John Milbank), and Žižek's Jokes (Did you hear the one about Hegel and negation?), these five published by the MIT Press.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Dialectical Materialism at the Gates	p. 2
The Stellar Parallax: The Traps of Ontological Difference
The Subject, This "Inwardly Circumcised Jew"	p. 16
The Tickling Object
The Kantian Parallax
The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies
The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes
Soave sia il vento... The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy
Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology	p. 68
A Boy Meets the Lady
Kierkegaard as a Hegelian
Die Versagung
The Traps of Pure Sacrifice
The Difficulty of Being a Kantian
The Comedy of Incarnation
Odradek as a Political Category
Too Much Life!
Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism of Henry James	p. 124
The Solar Parallax: The Unbearable Lightness of Being No One
The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Divine Shit	p. 146
Burned by the Sun
Pick Up Your Cave! Copernicus, Darwin, Freud and Many Others
Toward a New Science of Appearances
Resistances to Disenchantment
When the God Comes Around
The Desublimated Object of Post-Ideology
Danger? What Danger?
The Loop of Freedom	p. 200
"Positing the Presuppositions"
A Cognitivist Hegel? The False Opacity
Emotions Lie, or, Where Damasio is Wrong
Hegel, Marx, Denett
From Physics to Design? The Unconscious Act of Freedom
The Language of Seduction, the Seduction of Language
Objet Petit A in Social Links, or, The Impasses of Anti-Anti-Semitism	p. 252
The Lunar Parallax: Toward a Politics of Subtraction
From Surplus-Value to Surplus-Power	p. 272
Ontic Errance, Ontological Truth
Gelassenheit? No Thanks! Toward the Theory of the Stalinist Musical
The Biopolitical Parallax
The Historicity of the Four Discourses
Jouissance as a Political Category
Do We Still Live in a World?
The Obscene Knot of Ideology, and How to Untie It	p. 330
The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance
Human Rights versus the Rights of the Inhuman
Violence Enframed
The Ignorance of the Chicken
Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Fundamentalism? Over the Rainbow Coalition!...
Notes	p. 387
Index	p. 431
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