Less Than Nothing

Introduction

Published by Verso in 2012 with the subtitle “Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism”, this is Žižek’s longest book. He reads Hegel not as the philosopher of a closed, all-reconciling system but as a thinker of contingency and negativity, for whom “absolute knowing” means accepting a gap that cannot be closed. Chapters connect Hegel with Plato, Fichte, Lacan, Badiou and quantum physics and alternate with “interludes” on films, operas and politics. Žižek uses this reading to call for a renewed dialectical materialism, which he developed further in Absolute Recoil (2014).

Connections

Builds on

• Phenomenology of Spirit1807 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Science of Logic1812 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Écrits1966 · Jacques Lacan

More works by Slavoj Žižek

• 1989The Sublime Object of Ideology
• 2006The Parallax View