Agon Hamza - Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Materialism

Slavoj iek and Dialectical
Materialism

Slavoj iek and Dialectical
Materialism

Edited by
Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda

To our man of steel, Slavoj iek

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

There are many people who helped us in putting together this book.

First of all, we would like to thank the authors for their contributions to this volume.

Many thanks to Phil Getz and Alexis Nelson from Palgrave Macmillan for their help and assistance during the preparation of the manuscript.

We would also like to thank Serene John-Richards, Eva Heubach, Rodrigo Gonsalves, and Gabriel Tupinamb for their immense support and help.

Agon Hamza would like to thank Frank Ruda. Frank Ruda would like to thank Agon Hamza.

Introduction: The Absolute RevisitedSlavoj iek and Dialectical Materialism

Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda

T he concept for this book emerged after the publication of Slavoj ieks Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism . that we both coedit. We envisaged bringing together scholars who begin from different perspectives to seriously engage with the concept of dialectic in the work of G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Lacan as presented and systematically developed by iek in Absolute Recoil . But when we started putting this together, it became clear that the initial idea had to be expanded beyond the frame of a journal issue and required a properly systematic realization in the form of a book.

The present volume therefore became far more ambitious than the initial project. As the title of this book suggests, the volume you are about to read undertakes a critical and systematic investigation into the concept of dialectical materialism developed in the work of Slavoj iek. The main focus of this volume lies on his 2012 Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism although the term itself explicitly appears only from a certain moment on in the unfolding of ieks intellectual enterprise.

To gather thinkers on the topic of Slavoj iek and Dialectical Materialism implies a specific perspective on how to enter into and deal with ieks work. The articles assembled here therefore neither present an investigation of all aspects of his system (e.g., they do not elaborate upon the role and function of examples, jokes, and so forth in his thought) nor should they be taken as chapters of an introductory book to the philosophical system of iek. They all situate themselves within the very specific conceptual framework of the concatenation of dialectics and materialism and the volume as a whole seeks to bring forth its implications, consequences, and potential impasses as well as its possibly revolutionizing character for contemporary philosophical thought.

The contributors to this volume are ardent readers of and commentators on ieks work. Some of them may be called or may refer to themselves as iekians, others are either interlocutors or critical commentators of his work. This said, none of the contributors engages in a simple defense of ieks work, none in a simple rejection . All of them work with his work, and work through his work, and all of them do commit to the principle that his thought must be taken absolutely seriously, so seriously that one needs to investigate, discuss, criticize, and elaborate upon the most crucial conceptual and systematic dimensions it implies. What you are about to read is therefore not a simple work of propaganda for the renowned thinker Slavoj iek but a performative plea for reading him as seriously as any true philosopher should be read: to the letter.

Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda, Prishtina, Berlin, 2015

Notes

Materialism without Materialism: Slavoj iek and the Disappearance of Matter

Adrian Johnston

S lavoj ieks two most recent major philosophical works, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012) and Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (2014), both strive, as their subtitles indicate, to reinvent for the twenty-first century the Marxist tradition of dialectical materialism. Although this philosophical label is closely associated with such names as, first and foremost, Friedrich Engels and V. I. Lenin, iek seeks to develop a permutation that deviates markedly from the classical Engelsian and Soviet versions. As is to be expected, he pursues this via his characteristic blend of German idealism and psychoanalysis, utilizing the work of G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Lacan in order to creatively update dialectical materialism.