Slavoj Zizek is one of the world's leading contemporary cultural critics and a hugely prolific author. He is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, UK, and Visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research, New York, USA.
Sex and the Failed Absolute is to Zizek's corpus what Malevich's Black Square was to his artistic oeuvre. In this watershed book, interweaving the odd couple of quantum physics and sexuality, Zizek offers readers the distilled essence of a new dialectical materialism. This reinvents the very foundations of Zizekian ontology -- Adrian Johnston, Professor and Chair of Philosophy, University of New Mexico, U.S.A Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than Slavoj Zizek. -- John Gray, New York Review of Books Like Socrates on steroids ... breathtakingly perceptive. The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in many decades -- Terry Eagleton The excitable fluency, ursine congeniality and gleeful readiness to provoke and offend all feed the sense of authentic sponanaeity and energy that has made Zizek somethig like European philosophy's punk icon, packing out auditoriums around the world. -- Josh Cohen, New Statesman A gifted speaker-tumultuous, emphatic, direct-he writes as he speaks. -- Jonathan Ree, Guardian The most dangerous philosopher in the West -- Adam Kirsch, New Republic Zizek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation -- New Yorker a relentless iconoclast, a restless wordsmith, an inventive thinker with a hatred of received wisdom, an underminer of conventionally acknowledged truths. -- Bookforum