Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In Zizek's long-awaited magnum opus, he theorizes 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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction: Dialectical Materialism at the Gates (p. 2)
• I The Stellar Parallax: The Traps of Ontological Difference
• 1 The Subject, This "Inwardly Circumcised Jew" (p. 16)
• The Tickling Object
• The Kantian Parallax
• The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies
• The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes
• Soave sia il vento... The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy
• 2 Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology (p. 68)
• A Boy Meets the Lady
• Kierkegaard as a Hegelian
• Die Versagung
• The Traps of Pure Sacrifice
• The Difficulty of Being a Kantian
• The Comedy of Incarnation
• Odradek as a Political Category
• Too Much Life!
• Interlude I Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism of Henry James (p. 124)
• II The Solar Parallax: The Unbearable Lightness of Being No One
• 3 The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Divine Shit (p. 146)
• Burned by the Sun
• Pick Up Your Cave! Copernicus, Darwin, Freud and Many Others
• Toward a New Science of Appearances
• Resistances to Disenchantment
• When the God Comes Around
• The Desublimated Object of Post-Ideology
• Danger? What Danger?
• 4 The Loop of Freedom (p. 200)
• "Positing the Presuppositions"
• A Cognitivist Hegel? The False Opacity
• Emotions Lie, or, Where Damasio is Wrong
• Hegel, Marx, Denett
• From Physics to Design? The Unconscious Act of Freedom
• The Language of Seduction, the Seduction of Language
• Interlude 2 Objet Petit A in Social Links, or, The Impasses of Anti-Anti-Semitism (p. 252)
• III The Lunar Parallax: Toward a Politics of Subtraction
• 5 From Surplus-Value to Surplus-Power (p. 272)
• Ontic Errance, Ontological Truth
• Gelassenheit? No Thanks! Toward the Theory of the Stalinist Musical
• The Biopolitical Parallax
• The Historicity of the Four Discourses
• Jouissance as a Political Category
• Do We Still Live in a World?
• 6 The Obscene Knot of Ideology, and How to Untie It (p. 330)
• The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance
• Human Rights versus the Rights of the Inhuman
• Violence Enframed
• The Ignorance of the Chicken
• Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Fundamentalism? Over the Rainbow Coalition!...
• Notes (p. 387)
• Index (p. 431)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

A Lacanian-Hegelian philosopher and pop culture critic who divides his time between America and Slovenia, Zizek is one of the few living writers to combine theoretical rigor with compulsive readability, and his new volume provides perhaps the clearest elaboration of his theoretical framework thus far. Expatiating on such subjects as Heidegger, neuroscience, the war on terror and The Matrix, he seeks to rehabilitate dialectical materialism by replacing the popular "yin-yang" interpretation (the struggle between opposites that ultimately form a whole) with a theory of the "gap which separates the One from itself." One example is a tribe whose two subgroups draw mutually exclusive plans of their village: their deadlock "implies a hidden reference to a constant... an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole." Discussing Abu Ghraib and pedophilia in the Catholic Church, Zizek explores how an ideological edifice is sustained by underground transgressions: "Law can be sustained only by a sovereign power which reserves for itself the right... to suspend the rule of law(s) on behalf of the Law itself." Based on his interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, he envisions a society in which public law would no longer sustain itself through its own obscene breach. This challenging book takes us on a roller-coaster ride whose every loop is a Mobius strip. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Though immense, Zizek's work nevertheless possesses a central thematic unity: the Freudian subject as recast by Lacan. This book contains, as well, Zizek's signature reading of Freud and Lacan through a Hegelian and Marxist lens; in particular, the topic here is the "critique of non-dialectical reason," a critique that extends to any approach refusing an inherent double vision or what Zizek dubs "parallax." Zizek (Univ. of Ljubljana) insists that a complete theorization of the epistemic gap imposed by parallax (a gap that arises between two different perspectives that may simultaneously be maintained but never reconciled) is "the necessary first step in the rehabilitation of dialectical materialism." (For human action, such a split perspective must admit of a full-fledged commitment that is nevertheless aware of its potential failures and limitations.) In the realm of politics, Zizek imagines oppositional practices that, contrary to the illiberalism and false unities of contemporary policies, may be crystallized in Bartleby's refusal--"I would prefer not to." Such resistances, Zizek imagines, might disrupt the smooth functioning of the global postcapitalist system; if combined with the active abandonment of democracy (as a "master signifier"), new social spaces could then perhaps emerge. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above. D. W. Sullivan Metropolitan State College of Denver