Description
By (author) Žižek, Slavoj
Short /annotation:
Slavoj Žižek”s treatise on how insights from the field of Quantum Physics allow a total re-invention of how we think about history.
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A panoramic view of the cosmos must begin with thetension of a single political moment. In Quantum History, Slavoj Žižek brings together Hegelian dialectics, Lacan psychoanalysis and quantum mechanics to rethink history, reality and political possibility.
Taking up Lenin’s challenge to radically reconsider materialism in the wake of each big scientific discovery, and rejecting the recent vogue for giving a vague spiritualist spin to wave mechanics, Žižek embraces the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics with characteristic erudition and verve. Drawing on the central themes of the holographic universe, non-commutativity and the collapse of superpositions, Žižek evolves a quantum-inspired ontology which reinvents the historical materialism of Hegel and Heidegger – and compels a brutal, often darkly funny, inquisition into the chances of radical emancipatory acts today.
Quantum History takes the reader from the absolute contradiction of the primordial void through quantum oscillations to our ordinary reality, weaving in Lacan and Deleuze, Rovelli and Schelling, opera, cinema, sex and war. Žižek is at his sharpest, saddest, most provocative best as he demonstrates that there is no way of extracting ourselves from the texture of history, no neutral position from which the workings of the world can be observed transparently – we must act from a contingent, complex and inscrutable political moment, in sadness and in doubt, but defiantly.
Table of contents:
Introduction: Materialism and Quantum Criticism
I – Universal: Collapse Comes First
1 Why A Hegelian Needs Quantum Mechanics
2 Why Quantum Mechanics Needs Hegel
3 Noncommutativity in the Symbolic and in the (Quantum) Real
II –Particular: From Hegel to Heidegger… and Back
1Names for Finitude: Hegel, Heidegger, Pippin
2The Night of the World
3Heidegger”s Politics of Finitude
III – Singular: Politics in a Quantum World
1The Hologram of Conflicting Universalities
2Can Artificial Intelligence Really Think?
3The Politics of Vocation
Variations
Variation 1 – Frozen Beauty: Rovelli, Deleuze and the Stoics
Variation 2 – No Substitute for True Universals
Variation 3 – Pure Voice, Pure Sound: Beethoven, Globokar, Act
Variation 4 – Acts of Reconciliation
Variation 5 – Moderately Conservative Communism
Variation 6 – The Painted Void
Variation 7 – The Many Monsters of Cinema
Variation 8 – Sexual Superpositions
Variation 9 – Make The Kitchen Maid King
Conclusion: The Hunger to Be Something
Biographical note:
Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, and a Communist. He is International Director at the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities, University of London, UK, Visiting Professor at the New York University, USA, and Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Promotional headline:
Slavoj Žižek”s treatise on how insights from the field of Quantum Physics allow a total re-invention of how we think about history.
Feature:
Slavoj Žižek is one of the world”s most famous and provocative thinkers
Feature:
The first time Slavoj Žižek”s work has intersected with the science of quantum physics with surprising results
Feature:
Based on conversations with some of the world”s most prominent Quantum Physicists – an utterly original insight into this world
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