Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
In Less Than Nothing, the pinnacle publication of a distinguished career, Slavoj Žižek argues that it is imperative we not simply return to Hegel but we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Žižek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with the key strands of contemporary thought. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.
Paperback, 1056 pages
ISBN: 9781781681275
September 2013
$49.95 / £29.99 / $57.00CAN
Other Editions
Ebook
ISBN: 9781844679027
May 2012
$39.99
Hardback, 1056 pages
ISBN: 9781844678976
May 2012
$69.95 / £50.00 / $87.50CAN
Reviews
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“A lucid rendering of modern society’s debt to Hegel.”
Blog
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'Long Live the Dialectic', Long Live the Nothing
Steven Connor, in the Times Literary Supplement, sums up the major importance of Slavoj Žižek's ''everlasting gobstopper of a book" Less Than Nothing. In a single paragraph, Connor explains Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as the 'engorgement' of Spirit through the dialectical movement of history (spirit meets its negative antagonist in the form of matter or the material world and responds by both preserving and overcoming both thesis and antithesis through the process of sublation), the principle of the postmodernist reaction to it (denouncing the Hegelian dialectic as one of several totalising conceptions of the world that it rejects) and finally Žižek's critical thrust that manages to:
both discredit postmodernist arguments in their dependence on a dishing of Hegel, and to endorse the objections to totality that are key to those postmodernist arguments.
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On your Marx...
Stuart Jeffries gives an overview of the mainstreaming of Marx in today's Guardian, featuring Verso authors Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Owen Jones and Slavoj Žižek as well as the new edition of The Communist Manifesto.
Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."...
Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support.
Jeffries interviews Jacques Rancière, philosopher, radical social historian (and Ségolène Royal's favourite thinker) to shed light on the 'new Marxism':
Aren't Marx's venerable ideas as useful to us as the hand loom would be to shoring up Apple's reputation for innovation? Isn't the dream of socialist revolution and communist society an irrelevance in 2012? After all, I suggest to Rancière, the bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancière refuses to be downbeat: "The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisis and to use them to disarm its adversaries.
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The stuff of nothing – Žižek found Higgs particle first!
Forget CERN and its cutting edge technology. Žižek single-handedly gets to the core of atoms and other microscopic particles to find what has been dubbed "the God particle" - needing only 943 pages!
Discussions
Begin a discussionOther books by Slavoj Žižek
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Contingency, Hegemony, Universality
by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, et al. -
Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
by Slavoj Žižek -
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)
Edited by Slavoj Žižek
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First As Tragedy, Then As Farce
by Slavoj Žižek -
For They Know Not What They Do
by Slavoj Žižek -
The Fragile Absolute
by Slavoj Žižek
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The Idea of Communism
Edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek -
The Idea of Communism 2
Edited by Slavoj Žižek -
In Defense of Lost Causes
by Slavoj Žižek
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The Indivisible Remainder
by Slavoj Žižek -
Iraq
by Slavoj Žižek -
Lacan
Edited by Slavoj Žižek
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Living in the End Times
by Slavoj Žižek -
Mapping Ideology
Edited by Slavoj Žižek -
The Metastases of Enjoyment
by Slavoj Žižek
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The Plague of Fantasies
by Slavoj Žižek -
Revolution at the Gates
by V. I. Lenin -
The Sublime Object of Ideology
by Slavoj Žižek
