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"Zizek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation" New Yorker "The giant of Ljubljana provides the best intellectual high since Anti-Oedipus." The Village Voice "The Elvis of cultural theory." Chronicle of Higher Education "Unafraid of confrontation and with a near limitless grasp of pop symbolism" The Times "Zizek is a thinker who regards nothing as outside his field: the result is deeply interesting and provocative." Guardian "The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in many decades." Terry Eagleton "Zizek is one of the few living writers to combine theoretical rigor with compulsive readability." Publishers Weekly"
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One of the signal features of our era is the re-emergence of the 'sacred' in all its different guises, from New Age paganism to the emerging religious sensitivity within cultural and political theory.
The wager of Zizek's The Fragile Absolute - published here with a new preface by the author - is that Christianity and Marxism can fight together against the contemporary onslought of vapid spiritualism. The revolutionary core of the Christian legacy is too precious to be left to the fundamentalists.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This was the first of Slavoj Zizek's titles that I bought, and I did so on the strength of the title and the promotional blurb on the jacket. On this showing, Slavoj is never less than stimulating, but his thought is bumble-bee like in the extreme. At or near the point when he is about to connect the dots together, he changes the subject, and then may or may not ever return to the point. The intellectual labour of digesting his work is a useful mental workout, but by the end you begin to feel that, apart from having been exposed to some Lacanian Freudian Hegelianism which you would otherwise have remained unfamiliar with, that labour has not really been rewarded with anything substantive to either evaluate or seek to apply. Fortunately, I have been a regular reader of the New Left Review for some years, so this sort of experience is not new. I bought the book hoping to find a fellow-traveller in Christian Marxism, or at least some overt argument for Marxist sympathy toward Christianity with or without acknowledgement of the intellectual soundness of theism. Instead what is to be found, after some (interesting) trudging back and forth is a little about Jesus and a little about 1st Corinthians 12 interpreted indirectly through a freudian prism. The cover blurb promising recollection and rehabilitation of the Christian sources of revolutionary idealism is never fulfilled at all. The puzzle of the man is that such exciting Marxist dynamism as a speaker and pundit can arise among the stagnant intellectual reek of my two most despised thinkers of the nineteenth century: Freud and Hegel.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Slavoj Zizek (pronounced Slavoy Jijek) is without doubt the finest mind in European Philosophy since Wittgenstein. In a world obsessed with post-modernism, and its consequent rejection of objective reality, Zizek attempts, in 'The Fragile Absolute', to reclaim the Enlightenment project of Kant, Hegel and Marx from the clutches of thinkers who have abandoned overarching theories of the world. From Francis Fukyama's 'end of history' to Baudrillards sophistry, Zizek takes a razor sharp knife and cuts off the many heads of post-modernist illusionists. To acheive this he recounts the proper Marxist critique of the Capitalist obsession with commodification of objects into fetishistic objects of desire. Zizek fuses Lacanian psycho-analysis with an account of Christianity which throws fundamentalist religion, and new age 'babble' into the dustbin of postmodern fantasy. He argues, critically, that only by reclaiming the possibility of objective, overarching values and concerns can the world hope to come to an account of life that is both replete with integrity, and complete in its rejection of mystification dressed as 'truth'. The truth is out there but we can only find it if we 'uncouple' illusion and relativistic concerns from what is claimed (particularly, now, by Bush and Blair)as absolute truth.
This is a difficult book but it is never pretensious. It will stretch you to the limits of your knowledge. You will need to re-read it perhaps three or four times, initially, to fully benefit from the experience of an encounter with a true book of wisdom - philosophy as it should be.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Much in this book has been recycled from other works by Zizek -- or has appeared here first and then been recycled in other Zizek's works. Whichever way one looks at it, this book contains some ideas which can be found only here and not elsewhere. Well worth the time and the expense.
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