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.

Slavoj Zizek is a Hegelian philosopher, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, and a Communist. He is International Director at the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities, University of London, UK, Visiting Professor at the New York University, USA, and Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.