In 2012, the world-renowned philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek released his 1000-page tome Less Than Nothing, following it up afterwards with its shorter reformulation Absolute Recoil in 2014. The works contained his usual use of movie-references, historical and political events and jokes to engage in some substantial philosophical formulations, particularly in dialogue with Hegel and Lacan. In these books, Žižek forged a new developed a number of innovative approaches to various philosophical questions, from quantum mechanics to contemporary political movements. Adrian Johnston’s most recent book on Žižek, A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek and Dialectical Materialism (Columbia University Press, 2018) traces a number of these various developments in detail, salvaging the key philosophical themes while also offering several criticisms and developments of his own.

Adrian Johnston is Distinguished Professor in and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico and is a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. His many books include Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (2008) and Badiou, Žižek and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (2009). With Slavoj Žižek and Todd McGowan, he is a co-editor of the book series Diaeresis, all from Northwestern University Press.

Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer.

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Adrian Johnston, "A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek and Dialectical Materialism" (Columbia UP, 2018)