Slavoj Zizek
Sinossi
The feature which distinguishes the great works of materialist thought, from Lucretius De rerum natura through 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 which can never be sublated in the ideal medium of language. The Indivisible Remainder 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 line 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; the epistemological deadlocks of quantum physics. Although the book is packed with examples from politics and popular culture the unmistakable token of 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.
contenuti
INTRODUCTION
PART I F.W.J. SCHELLING, OR, AT THE ORIGINS OF DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
1 Schelling-in-itself: The 'Orgasm of Forces'
Before the Beginning • The unconscious act • The contraction of Being • Drives and their rotary motion • From freedom to a free subject • The divine madness • Schellingian politics • The primordial dissonance • `Symbolic castration' • The paradox of reflection • The virtual reality of Ideas • The ascent from Eternity to Time • The 'enchainment' • 'Selfhood as such is spirit' • Existence and its Ground • Evil as the perverted unity of Existence and Ground • The three levels of freedom • The materialist notion of subject • The Absolute 'out of mind' • The 'formula of the world'
2 Schelling-for-Hegel: The 'Vanishing Mediator'
From subjectivization to subjective destitution • Desire versus drive • 'The voice is a voice' • 'And' as a category • The ambiguous status of lalangue • What is idealism? • The 'repressed' genesis of modernity • Die Versagung: from Paul Claudel ... • ... to France Pregeren • The dialectical transubstantiation • How does the Spirit return to itself? • There is no subject without an empty signifier • The precipitate identification • The semblance of the 'objective Spirit' • The symbolic sleight of hand • 'A is a' • Voice as a supplement • The shofar • How not to read Lacan's 'formulas of sexuation' • Femininity as masquerade •In praise of hysteria • 'Desire is the desire of the Other'
PART II RELATED MATTERS
3 Quantum Physics with Lacan
The 'wired' desire • The Cartesian cyberpunk • Cynicism as reflected ideology • Cynicism versus irony • Quantum physics' `thesis eleven' • `Complementarity' • Against historicism • How does one make a rat human? • Five lessons of the 'double-slit' • Creatio ex nihilo
INDEX
