Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism [Hardcover]

Yes, I'm writing this the day that I received it. However, like no other book Zizek since Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (Routledge Classics) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (October Books) have I felt such a sense of "worth it". While I pride myself on a solid background in German Idealism, and consider myself strongly aligned with Lacan, this book pushes beyond my expectations for insightfulness while retaining Zizek's typical style that includes passing references to cinema, jokes, and acknowledgement of the brilliance of other philosophers (no one does this better than Zizek... giving credit where credit is due). I'm sure admirers of Zizek have already purchased and received this, the same as I have, so I would be preaching to the choir in recommending this book, but to those who have circled around his ideas, are interested in Hegel, Lacan, Kant, Schelling, and Fichte (Fichte! who writes about my beloved Fichte these days?!?), this is worth the purchase. Updates to this review will follow.

This is a warning: once you open this book and start to read, it is almost impossible to close it. There are great balls of fire jumping out every time you turn a page. Since the book contains 1038 pages, some of them must be read carefully, it may disrupt your plans, not just for the evening, but for the following days. What is especially provoking and enlightening is the way Zizek is positioning not just Hegel, but also Marx, in a Christian tradition. By turning Christianity upside down, and defining it as an atheist religion, he is able to make sense of the myths in a new and surprising way. And at the same time it suddenly is possible to see the links between Christianity, Marxism, and the Communism of Eastern Europe in a new way. His interpretation of Hegel is to me as a sociologist new and refreshing. Zizek not just defends Hegel in an admirable way, he clarifies the deep contemporary relevance of Hegel and his version of dialectical materialism in a way which demands attention, not just among philosophers, but also among sociologists trying to make sense of our contemporary political economy. In a work with this scope, it goes without saying, there are also ideas and sections which demands further work and discussion. My critical comment (after 500 pages) is the way Marx political economy is treated. Seen from the point of departure of Hegel, it is justified with a main emphasis on Capital Volume 2, on circulation, and the relation to modern financial capitalism, which are our time-travelers, borrowing money from the future, and destroying it. According to my opinion, Marx analysis of technology, which is crucial to the ways in which humans relate to nature, deserves more attention. What appears to be a financial crisis is also, perhaps primarily, related to the ways in which technological paradigms destabilize the global economy and creates technological unemployment. A related issue is the missing debate on neo-classical economic theory, the phenomenological economy of Shutz and Löwe, and the classical debate between the old guard in the Frankfurter School and the Stalinist Marxists on the dialectics of nature.

I've been bouncing around this Moby-Dick-of-a-book;I don't think a review is possible, you'd need some fractal organization--- and if you've followed Zizek's Lectures since 2006, this oeuvre makes for not only a nice compact, (yes compact) summary,but a development of those ideas presented in the past, many times in sketch form for a lecture.
All the opaque moments one found in Zizek are all now clarified in great detail, well some detail and conceptual scope. You learn to live with the jokes, or memorize them to repeat them at a bar, or to impress your endowed date.

But Zizek's engagements with spiritual life is again re-interated herein in great detail, Christianity, Judaism,What is ideology?, a never-ending question, and how is it represented the "monstrosities" we've all learned to live with.

You should not walk away from Zizek now with any sketch, and incompletedness of anything,it's all clear,comprehensive, all spelled out and,developed and you should have learned by now, that he presses,engages thought to its limits;it's own limits. Thought, the imagination not going as far as it can is reprehensible, odious, as Mao's Idealism,it's not worth our time anymore, to go half-way, half baked thought for short extension spans as the bytes "nouveau philosophes" in France a la, Glukesmann; It is not worth the time.

The book is critical of those in history, in the intellectual thought of Europa who met their own paradigms and tropes half way, as Kant, as Hegel,Rorty, in places,and as Lacan,those whom he loves.( Lacan did have fun in his last years with all those geometric metaphors topologies of the unconscious,the imagination) I'd throw in Lenin, Wittgenstein and Schoenberg I suspect, the Master,Maitre Lacan didn't mount the poll as far as he could. . . we all accept that there are gaps, voids to be filled.We fill them everyday with desires, objet petit a, makes it's appearance herein;Things we only know after we know them,like that quote from Beckett someplace," I must have seen you before, since I'm seeing you now. . ."

You'll find Zizek loves a good fight; and he spars,stings those who have takened issue with him; the cognitive cadres, Dennett(you know his story of the sea anemone) and the old fashioned deconstructionists, and Deleuze, who he also loves;I do; and the atheists,(the only true believers) Sam Harris,and the new gifted thinkers as Meillasoux, those who have the audacity to present a pathway Zizek himself didn't have the time to develop. He loves everyone. . ., I guess he is the last Romantic;,perhaps Zizek has had too much Wagner in his "cognitive diet".
He never fails to express referential gratitudes, platitudes, whenever necessary; as Catherine Malabou and the innovative path of her "plasticity"(freedom) in Hegel, another "open road" for us to enter. . . then love is a topic via Badiou,the "walking Plato" amongst us,Once you get past the performative moments in Zizek, and if you've been with him for the past decade, you should begin to develop your own repertoire of conceptual undercurrents that runs through his work, like the stream on Dante's "Purgatorio" running deep; coming to the mountain in the blue azur of half darkness. So the dialectic is given a fresh amount of time; correlations, the Lacan lexicon is perennial, signifiers prancing and shouting down the streets of Hollywood, the signified waiting to be discovered.

After 20 pages or so of this tome; I've found myself reading Hegel,"the Phenomenology. . " and Kojeve"s Lectures. . . you're attractors will stiffen,magnetized for this;,like in "Close Encounters. . " where Richard Dreyfuss and others were subconsciously drawn toward a shape;, I suspect you will be drawn to Marx as well. Keep reading. . . ! You wont regret it.
In reading this Zizek There are no protective "sunglasses" to wear unfortunately,(as Sloterdijk might claim that we have already in our safe and secure cocoons of existence our own complaisance states of comfort, our Spheres of the Lebenswelt; Zizek wants you to go the distance, all 15 rounds. . .

The book is structured like a vast symphonic form,larger than Beethoven's Ninth, with numerous "interludes" to help us catch our breath. Have fun!