Sex and the Failed Absolute ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Disparities , Slavoj Ž i ž ek Antigone , Slavoj Ž iž ek Sex and the Failed Absolute Slavoj Ž i ž ek BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Slavoj Ž i ž ek, 2020 Slavoj Ž i ž ek has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work. Cover design by Egbert Clement Cover image © Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third- party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-4378-7 ePDF: 978-1-3500-4377-0 eBook: 978-1-3500-4379-4 Typeset by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To fi nd out more about our authors and books visit w ww.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters . There is great chaos under heaven, so my situation with Jela is excellent! Contents Introduction: The Unorientable Space of Dialectical Materialism 1 Theorem I: The Parallax of Ontology 17 Modalities of the Absolute 18 Reality and Its Transcendental Supplement 27 Varieties of the Transcendental in Western Marxism 41 The Margin of Radical Uncertainty 57 Corollary 1: Intellectual Intuition and Intellectus Archetypus: Refl exivity in Kant and Hegel 65 Intellectual Intuition from Kant to Hegel 65 From Intellectus Ectypus to Intellectus Archetypus 75 Scholium 1.1: Buddha, Kant, Husserl 87 Scholium 1.2: Hegel’s Parallax 97 Scholium 1.3: The “Death of Truth” 103 Theorem II: Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute 107 Antinomies of Pure Sexuation 107 Sexual Parallax and Knowledge 119 The Sexed Subject 136 Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans 146 vii viii Contents Corollary 2: Sinuosities of Sexualized Time 163 Days of the Living Dead 163 Cracks in Circular Time 178 Scholium 2.1: Schematism in Kant, Hegel . . . and Sex 193 Scholium 2.2: Marx, Brecht, and Sexual Contracts 199 Scholium 2.3: The Hegelian Repetition 209 Scholium 2.4: Seven Deadly Sins 215 Theorem III: The Three Unorientables 219 M ö bius Strip, or, the Convolutions of Concrete Universality 225 The “Inner Eight” 232 Suture Redoubled 239 Cross- Capping Class Struggle 245 From Cross-Cap to Klein Bottle 251 A Snout in Plato’s Cave 259 Corollary 3: The Retarded God of Quantum Ontology 273 The Implications of Quantum Gravity 274 The Two Vacuums: From Less than Nothing to Nothing 291 Is the Collapse of a Quantum Wave Like a Throw of Dice? 301 Scholium 3.1: The Ethical Mö bius Strip 309 Scholium 3.2: The Dark Tower of Suture 313 Scholium 3.3: Suture and Hegemony 317 Contents ix Scholium 3.4: The World with(out) a Snout 319 Scholium 3.5: Towards a Quantum Platonism 333 Theorem IV: The Persistence of Abstraction 343 Madness, Sex, War 343 How to Do Words with Things 351 The Inhuman View 359 The All- Too-Close In-I tself 372 Corollary 4: Ibi Rhodus Ibi Saltus! 387 The Protestant Freedom 388 Jumping Here and Jumping There 394 Four Ethical Gestures 403 Scholium 4.1: Language, Lalangue 429 Scholium 4.2: Prokofi ev’s Travels 441 Scholium 4.3: Beckett as the Writer of Abstraction 451 Index 459