Sex and the Failed Absolute

[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 * Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than Slavoj Žižek. * John Gray, New York Review of Books * Like Socrates on steroids ... breathtakingly perceptive. The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in many decades * Terry Eagleton * 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 * A gifted speaker—tumultuous, emphatic, direct—he writes as he speaks. * Jonathan Rée, Guardian * The most dangerous philosopher in the West * Adam Kirsch, New Republic * Žižek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation * New Yorker * 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 * a relentless iconoclast, a restless wordsmith, an inventive thinker with a hatred of received wisdom, an underminer of conventionally acknowledged truths. * Bookforum * 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 *