Slavoj Zizek and Dialectical Materialism

Slavoj ?i?ek has been widely described as one of the most important and influential contemporary thinkers, philosophers, and cultural critics. However, despite the often critical attention and reviews his work garners in scholarly journal articles and books, systematic philosophical engagements with ?i?ek's thought remain a surprisingly rare phenomenon. Counteracting this dearth of substantive interaction, the contributors to this volume engage with crucial and fundamental aspects of ?i?ek's thought. The book follows a Hegelian motivation that is itself dear to ?i?ek, tracing the concept of dialectical materialism in his more recent work. It takes as its concrete starting point the most current, systematic elaborations of ?i?ek's thought, namely Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism as well as his magnum opus Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. The contributors provide concrete elaborations of arguments developed within these two works, giving voice to their universal implications. The book also features an afterword by ?i?ek himself, in which he critically examines the work of Levi Bryant as well as the tradition of object-oriented-ontology on the whole.

Agon Hamza is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He serves as the co-editor-in-chief of the international philosophical journal Crisis and Critique. His latest publications are Repeating ?i?ek and a co-authored book with Slavoj ?i?ek, entitled From Myth to Symptom: The Case of Kosovo.

Frank Ruda is Interim-Professor for Philosophy of Audiovisual Media at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany. He is also Visiting Lecturer at Bard College, Germany, and at the Institute for Philosophy at the Academy for Arts and Sciences, Ljubljana, Slovenia. His publications include: Hegel's Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel's Philosophy of Right, For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism, and Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for the Contemporary Use of Fatalism.