Indivisible Remainder

Product Description

The feature which distinguishes the great works of materialist thought from Lucretius De rerum natura through Capital to the writings of Lacan is their unfinished character: again & again they tackle their chosen problem. Schelling s Weltalter drafts belong to this same series with their repeated attempt at the formulation of the beginning of the world of the passage from the pre-symbolic pulsation of the Real to the universe of logos. F.W.J. Schelling the German idealist who for too long dwelled in the shadow of Kant & Hegel was the first to formulate the post-idealist motifs of finitude contingency & temporality. His unique work announces Marxs critique of speculative idealism as well as the properly Freudian notion of drive of a blind compulsion to repeat which can never be sublated in the ideal medium of language. The Indivisible Remainder begins with a detailed examination of the two works in which Schellings speculative audacity reached its peak: his essay on human freedom & his drafts on the Ages of the World. After reconstituting their line of argumentation Slavoj Zizek confronts Schelling with Hegel & concludes by throwing a Schellingian light on some related matters: the consequences of the computerization of daily life for sexual experience; cynicism as todays predominant form of ideology; the epistemological deadlocks of quantum physics. Although the book is packed with examples from politics & popular culture the unmistakable token of Zizek s style from Speed & Groundhog Day to Forrest Gump it signals a major shift towards a systematic concern with the basic questions of philosophy & the roots of the crisis of our late-capitalist universe centred around the enigma of modern subjectivity.