Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #49535 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-28
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 528 pages

Synopsis
In Zizek's long-awaited magnum opus, he theorises the "parallax gap" in the ontological, the scientific, and the political - and rehabilitates dialectical materialism. "The Parallax View" is Slavoj Zizek's most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years; Zizek himself describes it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Zizek is interested in the "parallax gap" separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an "impossible short circuit" of levels that can never meet. From this consideration of parallax, Zizek begins a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism. Modes of parallax can be seen in different domains of today's theory, from the wave-particle duality in quantum physics to the parallax of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis between interpretations of the formation of the unconscious and theories of drives.

In "The Parallax View", Zizek with his usual astonishing erudition, focuses on three main modes of parallax: the ontological difference, the ultimate parallax that conditions our very access to reality; the scientific parallax, the irreducible gap between the phenomenal experience of reality and its scientific explanation, which reaches its apogee in today's brain sciences (according to which "nobody is home" in the skull, just stacks of brain meat - a condition Zizek calls "the unbearable lightness of being no one"); and the political parallax, the social antagonism that allows for no common ground. Between his discussions of these three modes, Zizek offers interludes that deal with more specific topics - including an ethical act in a novel by Henry James and anti-anti-Semitism. "The Parallax View" not only expands Zizek's Lacanian-Hegelian approach to new domains (notably cognitive brain sciences) but also provides the systematic exposition of the conceptual framework that underlies his entire work. Philosophical and theological analysis, detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music coexist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes.

Customer Reviews

too late to wait for Bartleby's preference
I don't know why this book is so disappointing. Perhaps it is because it is a bit late. Zizek's attempt to deal with the clash between the advance of bio-determinism in the genetics and pharmaceutics industries on the one hand, and the solidity of the post-Frankfurt social sciences on the other, does not do justice either to the latter or to
the dialectical epistemology which he claims to be trying to rehabilitate.

The real irony for Zizek is that what he is trying to say has already been handled in the established virtuality of literary fiction. First there was George Elliot's The Lifted Veil, the strangest of all her books and the only one that somehow doesn't quite work. Then came Houellebecq's lamentable Atomised reprising 1950s racism and sexism in response to the cracking of the genetic code. Finally there was Gdala's dialectical transcendence of Houellebecq's anthithesis in Pascal's Wager where all the double themes of Z's Parallax (from the centrality of the virtual, through the Lacanian transformation, to the historicism implicit in genetic and biochemical fatalism), all of these threads are carefully disentagled and rebraided in red gold and green.

I thought that it was from Zizek that I learned the idea that the clue to the contemporary default constellations is always to be found in a fictional narrative. I think it is time he deployed a different strategy if he is to engage with the real material challenges of the moment. It's too late for this kind of thing.