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.
COBISS.SI-ID: 2800775
The paper exploits love and its professing as a pretext to demonstrate a very particular phenomenology of language use, in which the direction of reference reverses. In love, arguably, we no longer use words in order to refer to things, but exploit the object of love as a mere occasion, at which we begin to refer to the word “love” itself. With the intention to outline the new logical space established by professing love, the paper defines the declarations of love to be abstract, conventional, mirror- symmetrical, and finally ritually and ceremonially repeated, thus defying the pragmatic constraints of ordinary language. As such, the technique of professing love is placed in opposition to the tenor of twentieth-century philosophy of language, most notably Wittgenstein’s, which a priori reduced enunciation to the place of enunciation and curtailed sentences into mere statements uttered in this or that situation. Inversely, love is shown to transform the word as word into the object of its own specific reference and reverence, thereby reversing the Wittgensteinian operation and elevating the statement back into a full-blown, trans-contextual, ideally motivated sentence.
COBISS.SI-ID: 70915426
The article explores the relation between the processes of de-symbolization of the world taking place outside philosophy and the formation of the philosophical subject. This new attempt at defining the origins of subjectivity is based on a novel reading of Augustine, whose philosophy exhibits a peculiar correlation: on the one hand, he is often deemed the inventor of the “private inner space” of a contemplative, soliloquizing self; on the other hand, he is an advocate of an ontologically homonomous world, i.e., the Christian monism of good against the Gnostic and Manichean dualisms of good and evil. In our interpretation, his infamous “self” contracts into himself around the consciousness of its sin, thereby assuming the role of the worldly representative of “evil”; that is, it arises by interiorizing the very element which was excluded from the monist universe. On the grounds of this matrix, the emergence of other momentous subjects of Western philosophy, such as Cartesian ego, Kantian spontaneous, synthetic unity of apperception, Nietzsche's overman, Heidegger's Dasein, or the psychoanalytical subject of gender difference will also be construed as reactions to the collapsing symbolic values of the world. The thesis is that the rise of a self-reflexive being serves to re-invest the dissolving structures of meaning and preserve their semantic tension within the boundaries of its inner world.
COBISS.SI-ID: 69767266