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Sex and the Failed Absolute
- Author
- Slavoj Žižek
- Narrator
- Joe Jameson
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- Publish Date
- 15 October 2026
- Run Time
- 18 hours 21 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
In the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical system to date, Slavoj Žižek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism.
In forging this new materialism, Žižek critiques and challenges not only the work of Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux, and Julia Kristeva (to name but a few), but everything from popular science and quantum mechanics to sexual difference and analytic philosophy. Alongside striking images of the Möbius strip, the cross-cap, and the Klein bottle, Žižek brings alive the Hegelian triad of being-essence-notion. Radical new readings of Hegel, and Kant, sit side by side with characteristically lively commentaries on film, politics, and culture.
Here is Žižek at his interrogative best.
Critics Review
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[This] is certainly the best organized and clearly structured of the author's “big” books … Žižek's writing style is much clearer (relatively speaking) than it was in earlier works and thus reflects the fact that many careless readers have (mis)read him simplistically … Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.
CHOICE
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Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than Slavoj Žižek.
John Gray, New York Review of Books
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Like Socrates on steroids ... breathtakingly perceptive.
The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in many decadesTerry Eagleton
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The excitable fluency, ursine congeniality and gleeful readiness to provoke and offend all feed the sense of authentic sponanaeity and energy that has made Žižek somethig like European philosophy’s punk icon, packing out auditoriums around the world.
Josh Cohen, New Statesman
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A gifted speaker—tumultuous, emphatic, direct—he writes as he speaks.
Jonathan Rée, Guardian
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The most dangerous philosopher in the West
Adam Kirsch, New Republic
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Žižek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation
New Yorker
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A penetrating new study that redefines a term that most would be wary of returning to: dialectical materialism. What the feeling of déjà vu in reading Sex and the Failed Absolute does come from is the re-experiencing of the excitement that characterised reading his first book back in 1989.
Scottish Left Review
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a relentless iconoclast, a restless wordsmith, an inventive thinker with a hatred of received wisdom, an underminer of conventionally acknowledged truths.
Bookforum
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Sex and the Failed Absolute is to Žižek’s corpus what Malevich’s Black Square was to his artistic oeuvre. In this watershed book, interweaving the odd couple of quantum physics and sexuality, Žižek offers readers the distilled essence of a new dialectical materialism. This reinvents the very foundations of Žižekian ontology
Adrian Johnston, Professor and Chair of Philosophy, University of New Mexico, U.S.A
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Details
- Author
- Slavoj Žižek
- Narrator
- Joe Jameson
- Duration
- 18 hours 21 minutes
- Release Date
- 15 October 2026
- ISBN
- 9781350604599
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- Genre
- Social and political philosophy, Psychoanalytical and Freudian psychology, Far-left political ideologies and movements, Philosophy: metaphysics and ontology
Synopsis
Bloomsbury presents Sex and the Failed Absolute by Slavoj Žižek, read by Joe Jameson.In the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical system to date, Slavoj Žižek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism.In forging this new materialism, Žižek critiques and challenges not only the work of Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux, and Julia Kristeva (to name but a few), but everything from popular science and quantum mechanics to sexual difference and analytic philosophy. Alongside striking images of the Möbius strip, the cross-cap, and the Klein bottle, Žižek brings alive the Hegelian triad of being-essence-notion. Radical new readings of Hegel, and Kant, sit side by side with characteristically lively commentaries on film, politics, and culture.Here is Žižek at his interrogative best.
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