Quantum History

Slavoj Zizek's treatise on how insights from the field of Quantum Physics allow a total re-invention of how we think about history

A panoramic view of the entire cosmos must begin with the unbearable 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 Lenins challenge to radically rethink 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 of the chances of radical emancipatory acts today.Quantum Historytakes 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.

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