About the Book
Parallax, or the change in the position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight and more precisely, the assumption that this adjustment is not only due to a change of focus, but a change in that object’s ontological status has been a key philosophical concept throughout history.
Building upon Slavoj Žižek’s The Parallax View, this volume shows how parallax is used as a figure of thought that proves how the incompatibility between the physical and the theoretical touches not only upon the ontological, but also politics and aesthetics. With articles written by internationally renowned philosophers such as Frank Ruda, Graham Harman, Paul Livingston and Zizek himself, this book shows how modes of parallax remain in numerous modern theoretical disciplines, such as the Marxian parallax in the critique of political economy and politics; and the Hegelian parallax in the concept of the work of art, while also being important to debates surrounding speculative realism and dialectical materialism. Spanning philosophy, parallax is then a rich and fruitful concept that can illuminate the studies of those working in epistemology, ontology, German Idealism, political philosophy and critical theory.
Table of Contents:
Preface: Hegel and the Ethical Parallax, Slavoj Žižek
Introduction
Part 1: Parallax in Ontology
1. Parallactic Entanglement: On the Subject-Object-Relation in New Materialism and Adorno’s Critical Ontology, Dirk Quadflieg (University of Leipzig, Germany)
2. Žižek’s Parallax, or The Inherent Stupidity of All Philosophical Positions, Graham Harman (SCI-Arc, Los Angeles, USA)
3. How Mind fits into Nature. Mental Realism after Nagel, Markus Gabriel (University of Bonn, Germany)
4. Parallax in Hermeneutic Realism, Anton Friedrich Koch (University of Heidelberg, Germany)
5. Object-Disoriented Ontology. Realism in Psychoanalysis,Alenka Zupancic (Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia)
6. Temporal Paradox, Realism, and Subjectivity, Paul Livingston (Albuquerque University, USA)
7. The Parallactic Leap: Fichte, Apperception, and the Hard Problem of Consciousness, G. Anthony Bruno (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
8. The Parallax of Ontology: Reality and its Transcendental Supplement, Slavoj Žižek (Birkbeck, University of London, UK)
Part 2: Parallax in Normative Orders
9. Truth as Subjective Effect. Adorno or Hegel, Christoph Menke (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
10. Is Sex a Transcendental Category of Parallax? Revisiting the Feminist Second Wave, Nina Power (Roehampton University, UK)
11. The Irony of Self-Consciousness: Hegel, Derrida, and the Animal that therefore I am, Thomas Khurana (Yale University, USA)
12. A Squinting Gaze on the Parallax Between Spirit and Nature, Frank Ruda (University of Dundee, UK)
13. “I am nothing, but I make everything”: Marx, Lacan, and the Labor Theory of Suture, Adrian Johnston (University of New Mexico at Albuquerque)
Part 3: Parallax in Aesthetics
14. Drama as Philosophy. The Tragedy of the End of Art, Todd McGowan (University of Vermont, USA)
15. Parallaxes of Sinister Enjoyment: The Lessons of Interpassivity and the Contemporary Troubles with Pleasure, Robert Pfaller (University of the Arts, Linz, Austria)
16. Whiteheadian Aesthetics: On “Nautical Positionality” from a Process-Ontological Perspective, Eva Schürmann(University of Magdeburg, Germany)
17. Feeling at a Distance, or the Aesthetics of Unconscious Transmission, Tracy McNulty (Cornell University, USA)
18. The Dream That Knew Too Much. On Freud, Lacan, and Philip K. Dick, Dominik Finkelde (Munich School of Philosophy, Germany)
Notes on the contributors
Index of names
Index of subjects
About the Author :
Dominik Finkelde is Professor of Epistemology and Contemporary Philosophy at the Munich School of Philosophy. He publishes on contemporary philosophy and German Idealism, especially on Hegel, Kant, Lacan, Frege, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Žižek and Badiou.
Christoph Menke is Professor for Practical Philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. His research focuses on political and legal philosophy, theories of subjectivity, ethics and aesthetics.
Slavoj Žižek is Professor at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London, UK. His recent publications include Hegel in a Wired Brain (2020), Sex and the Failed Absolute (2019), Disparities (2016), and Antigone (2016), all published by Bloomsbury.
Review :
The editors of the anthology have succeeded in providing the academic community with a comprehensive overview of ['parallax'] logic.
Parallax brings together a remarkable group of philosophers around the problem of conceptualizing the identity and difference of mind and world. It represents, in a way, the “continental” response to the canonical “analytic” formulation of the problem put forth in McDowell’s Mind and World (along with the vast literature it generated). Under the heading of “parallax,” a notion introduced into philosophy by Slavoj Zizek, the present volume takes a step further; it makes it possible to include in our thinking about the core problem the very split and antagonism between these two traditions of thinking the problem. The essays are challenging and not for the faint at heart; given the stakes at issue one could hardly imagine it any other way.
The notion of parallax, as discussed in the contributions of this volume, offers a radical, surprising as well as disturbing perspective on the inextricable gap between mind and world: provoking a new and productive approach to the understanding of our - epistemic, scientific, aesthetic, ethical, and political - realities.
Inspired by a signature concept of Slavoj Žižek, this superb collection by distinguished contributors cross-fertilizes broad swaths of contemporary thought with fresh readings of German idealism. Especially for the way that it brings together a wide range of problematics and traditions, this book should make a difference.
