Failure as the Real: A Review of Slavoj Zizek's Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

Abstract

Zizek’s synthetic ontology is nothing less than an attempt to understand the real as the failed attempt. Failure penetrates the entirety of the text and is reminiscent of Doc Hammer’s take on The Venture Brothers, “It’s about the beauty of failure. It’s about the failure that happens to all of us.” For Zizek, the real is inseparable both from the radicalized material reality that forms everyone and everything from stardust as the heavenly bodies explode and collapse in the creative destruction of our ever expanding universe and the social meanings of our unique presentation as Nancy would say, as being(s) singular plural.

Keywords: Zizek, Failure, Ontology, Praxis, Bohr