Quantum History - A New Materialist Philosophy

A panoramic view of the cosmos must begin with the tension of a single political moment. In Quantum History, Slavoj Zizek brings together Hegelian dialectics, Lacan psychoanalysis and quantum mechanics to rethink history, reality and political possibility.

Taking up Lenin's challenge to radically reconsider materialism in the wake of each big scientific discovery, and rejecting the recent vogue for giving a vague spiritualist spin to wave mechanics, Zizek embraces the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics with characteristic erudition and verve. Drawing on the central themes of the holographic universe, non-commutativity and the collapse of superpositions, Zizek evolves a quantum-inspired ontology which reinvents the historical materialism of Hegel and Heidegger - and compels a brutal, often darkly funny, inquisition into the chances of radical emancipatory acts today.

Quantum History takes the reader from the absolute contradiction of the primordial void through quantum oscillations to our ordinary reality, weaving in Lacan and Deleuze, Rovelli and Schelling, opera, cinema, sex and war. Zizek is at his sharpest, saddest, most provocative best as he demonstrates that there is no way of extracting ourselves from the texture of history, no neutral position from which the workings of the world can be observed transparently - we must act from a contingent, complex and inscrutable political moment, in sadness and in doubt, but defiantly.

Introduction: Materialism and Quantum Criticism

I - Universal: Collapse Comes First
1 Why A Hegelian Needs Quantum Mechanics
2 Why Quantum Mechanics Needs Hegel
3 Noncommutativity in the Symbolic and in the (Quantum) Real

II - Particular: From Hegel to Heidegger... and Back
1 Names for Finitude: Hegel, Heidegger, Pippin
2 The Night of the World
3 Heidegger's Politics of Finitude

III - Singular: Politics in a Quantum World
1 The Hologram of Conflicting Universalities
2 Can Artificial Intelligence Really Think?
3 The Politics of Vocation

Variations

Variation 1 - Frozen Beauty: Rovelli, Deleuze and the Stoics
Variation 2 - No Substitute for True Universals
Variation 3 - Pure Voice, Pure Sound: Beethoven, Globokar, Act
Variation 4 - Acts of Reconciliation
Variation 5 - Moderately Conservative Communism
Variation 6 - The Painted Void
Variation 7 - The Many Monsters of Cinema
Variation 8 - Sexual Superpositions
Variation 9 - Make The Kitchen Maid King

Conclusion: The Hunger to Be Something