Introduction: The Absolute Revisited—Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Materialism

Abstract

The concept for this book emerged after the publication of Slavoj Žižek’s Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism.¹ The initial aim was to gather a series of responses to the book in the philosophical journal Crisis and Critique² that we both coedit. We envisaged bringing together scholars who begin from different perspectives to seriously engage with the concept of dialectic in the work of G. W. E Hegel and Jacques Lacan as presented and systematically developed by Žižek in Absolute Recoil. But when we started putting this together, it became clear that the initial idea had to be expanded beyond the frame of a journal issue and required a properly systematic realization in the form of a book.