Sex and the Failed Absolute
Good Fit
- Readers already versed in Hegel, Kant, and Lacan who don't shy away from dense theory
- Fans of Žižek's trademark blend of pop culture (Hitchcock, Tim Burton) and abstract philosophy
- Anyone seeking a critical, heterodox take on the philosophical foundations of Marxism
- Readers curious about the philosophical status of sexuality as a serious topic
Not a Fit
- Anyone wanting an introductory, simplified account — the book simplifies nothing
- Readers expecting popular/descriptive content about sex from the title — this is an abstract metaphysical inquiry
- Those wanting a fast, linear read — the text constantly loops back to rebuild its own argument
- Readers unfamiliar with Lacanian psychoanalytic terminology who don't want to seek extra context
From its title on, the book invites a double reading: "Sex and the Failed Absolute" points, on one hand, to how unrestrained hedonism poses as a false Absolute once faith in religion or the Absolute fails (as with Sade), and on the other, to how any attempt to elevate sexuality — inherently inconsistent — to the status of a new Absolute is doomed to fail.
Žižek illustrates this through the "woman question": a philosophical lineage running from Schelling to Sloterdijk has presented female orgasm as the ontological proof of God, the pinnacle of human evolution. Rather than simply dismissing this as "obscurantist New Age speculation," the author chooses to collapse it from within: describing sexuality as the highest experience of "Being" actually papers over the constitutive glitch or gap at the heart of human sexuality.
The book's real philosophical target is broader — rebuilding Stalinist "dialectical materialism." Žižek lists four theses from Stalin's 1938 text (nature as an indivisible whole, constant motion, quantitative leaps into quality, internal contradiction) and opposes each with a counter-thesis in his own "DM2": separation/cutting instead of wholeness, delay and "dead time" instead of sudden leaps, a non-orientable structure of repetition instead of linear progress, and a thing's constitutive contradiction with itself instead of external opposition.
To explain this "non-orientability," Žižek reaches for a mathematical metaphor: on surfaces like the Möbius strip, concepts like "left" and "right" cannot be fixed, because anything moved along the surface returns to its starting point as a mirror image. For Žižek, it is precisely this self-relating, circular structure that distinguishes true dialectical materialism from its Stalinist caricature.
To animate these abstractions, Žižek constantly reaches for pop culture: the sequoia scene in Hitchcock's "Vertigo" (Madeleine's "I was born here… I died here," later revealed as staged) becomes a metaphor for the historical span of German Idealism (1781, Kant's first Critique — 1831, Hegel's death); the opening credits of Tim Burton's "Batman" illustrate the idea of a "materialism without matter."
The chapter closes by recasting Heidegger's "ontological difference" as an "ontological parallax," setting modern science's evolutionary account of humanity against the transcendental-ontological view that calls this account circular — for Žižek the gap between the two cannot be closed, leaving the open question of whether this is the final word or whether the rest of the book offers a way out of the closed circle.
- Žižek repeatedly reaches for film examples (Hitchcock's "Vertigo," Tim Burton's "Batman") to explain abstract philosophical concepts
- Stalin's four theses on dialectical materialism are listed and each is met with a counter-thesis, giving the argument an unusually explicit structure
- A dense web of references (Schelling, Sloterdijk, Heidegger) compresses the text but makes the argument harder to follow
The author's earlier work developing the "ontological parallax" concept used in this book
The original source of the formulas of sexuation this book builds on
Places the Kant-to-Hegel period the book keeps referencing in broader context
Theorem I ("Modes of the Absolute") draws wide comparisons from Kant and Hegel to Buddhist philosophy and Husserl, tracing the historical evolution of the "transcendental."
Theorem II tackles the title topic head-on: from the antinomies of "pure sexuation" to how the sexed subject forms across the spectrum of plants, animals, humans, and the post-human.
Theorem III fuses the book's central topological metaphors (Möbius strip, cross-cap, Klein bottle) with class struggle and quantum physics — this is what Žižek calls the "non-orientable triad."
The final Theorem IV closes the book with "stubborn abstraction," examining madness, war, and language through Beckett and Prokofiev.
Coverage. This review covers only the Introduction, “The Non-Orientable Space of Dialectical Materialism” (pp. 11–25, roughly 3% of the 468-page book); the four main “Theorem” chapters are not discussed (only their topics are given below).
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Without the Vertigo and Batman examples I'd have struggled with the first chapter — Žižek's approach really works.
Don't be fooled by the title, it's not what you expect — very dense, very academic, but worth it.
The section pitting Stalin's four theses against Žižek's four counter-theses was the clearest part for me.
