The Indivisible Remainder by Slavoj Žižek

Although the book is packed with examples from politics and popular culture â€” the unmistakable token of Å½iÅ¾ekâ€™s style â€” 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. The Indivisible Remainder begins with a detailed examination of the two works in which Schellingâ€™s speculative audacity reached its peak: his essay on human freedom and his drafts on the â€œAges of the World.â€ After reconstituting their line of argumentation, Slavoj Å½iÅ¾ek confronts Schelling with Hegel, and concludes by throwing a Schellingian light on some â€œrelated mattersâ€: the consequences of the computerization of daily life for sexual experience cynicism as todayâ€™s predominant form of ideology the epistemological deadlocks of quantum physics. His unique work announces Marxâ€™s critique of speculative idealism, as well as the properly Freudian notion of drive, of a blind compulsion to repeat which can never be sublated in the ideal medium of language. 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. Schellingâ€™s Weltalter drafts belong to this same series, with their repeated attempt at the formulation of the â€˜beginning of the world,â€™ of the passage from the pre-symbolic pulsation of the Real to the universe of logos. The feature which distinguishes the great works of materialist thought, from Lucretiusâ€™ De rerum natura through Capital to the writings of Lacan, is their unfinished character: again and again they tackle their chosen problem.

The Indivisible Remainder by Slavoj Žižek