Disparities

Slavoj Žižek is one of the world's leading contemporary cultural critics and a hugely prolific author. He is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, UK, and Visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research, New York, USA.

INTRODUCTION: IS HEGEL DEAD — OR ARE WE DEAD (IN THE EYES OF HEGEL)?
When the Kraken Wakes
A Report from the Trenches of Dialectical Materialism

I THE DISPARITY OF TRUTH: SUBJECT, OBJECT, AND THE REST
1. FROM HUMAN TO POSTHUMAN AND BACK TO INHUMAN: THE PERSISTENCE OF ONTOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE
Aspects of Disparity
Against the Univocity of Being
Posthuman, Transhuman, Inhuman
Hyperobjects in the Age of Anthropocene
Biology or Quantum Physics?

2. OBJECTS, OBJECTS AND THE SUBJECT
Re-enchanting Nature? No, Thanks!
A Detour: Ideology in Pluriverse
On a Subject Which Is Not an Object
Resistance, Stasis, Repetition
Speculative Judgment
The Subject’s Epigenesis

3. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, WHICH SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS? AGAINST THE RENORMALIZATION OF HEGEL
In Defense of Hegel’s Madness
The Immediacy of Mediation
The Stick in Itself, for Us, for Itself
Action and Responsibility
Recollection, Forgiveness, Reconciliation
Healing the Wound
Self-consciousness = Freedom = Reason
Reflexivity of the Unconscious

II THE DISPARITY OF BEAUTY: THE UGLY, THE ABJECT, AND THE MINIMAL DIFFERENCE
4. ART AFTER HEGEL, HEGEL AFTER THE END OF ART
With Hegel Against Hegel
The Ugly Gaze
From the Sublime to the Monstrous
Hegel’s Path towards the Nonfigurative
Between Auschwitz and Telenovelas

5. VERSIONS OF ABJECT: UGLY, CREEPY, DISGUSTING
Varieties of Disavowal
Traversing Abjection
“MOOR EEFFOC”
From Abjective to Creepy
Mamatschi!
Eisler’s Sinthoms

6. WHEN NOTHING CHANGES: TWO SCENES OF SUBJECTIVE DESTITUTION
The Lesson of Psychoanalysis
Music as a Sign of Love
A Failed Betrayal
Scene from a Happy Life

III THE DISPARITY OF THE GOOD: TOWARDS A MATERIALIST NEGATIVE THEOLOGY
7. TRIBULATIONS OF A WOMAN-HYENA: AUTHORITY, COSTUME, AND FRIENDSHIP
Why Heidegger Should Not Be Criminalized
The Birth of Fascism out of the Spirit of Beauty
Don Carlos between Auhthority and Friendship
Stalin as Anti-Master
Schiller versus Hegel
The Self-Debased Authority

8. IS GOD DEAD, UNCONSCIOUS, EVIL, IMPOTENT, STUPID OR JUST COUNTERFACTUAL?
On Divine Inexistence
Counterfactuals
Retroactivity, Omnipotence, and Impotence
The Twelfth Camel as One of the Names of God
A Truth That Arises out of a Lie
The Divine Death-Drive
The Deposed God

9. JECT OR SCEND? FROM THE TRAUMATIZED SUBJECT TO SUBJECT AS TRAUMA
The Parallax of Drive and Desire
Immortality as Death in Life
The Troubles with Finitude
Materialism or Agnosticism?
A Comical Conclusion

CONCLUSION: THE COURAGE OF HOPELESSNESS
The Millenarian “Exhalation of Stale Gas”
Divine Violence
The Points of the Impossible

Index