Parallax

Parallax, or the change in the position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight and more precisely, the assumption that this adjustment is not only due to a change of focus, but a change in that object’s ontological status has been a key philosophical concept throughout history.

Building upon Slavoj Žižek’s The Parallax View, this volume shows how parallax is used as a figure of thought that proves how the incompatibility between the physical and the theoretical touches not only upon the ontological, but also politics and aesthetics. With articles written by internationally renowned philosophers such as Frank Ruda, Graham Harman, Paul Livingston and Zizek himself, this book shows how modes of parallax remain in numerous modern theoretical disciplines, such as the Marxian parallax in the critique of political economy and politics; and the Hegelian parallax in the concept of the work of art, while also being important to debates surrounding speculative realism and dialectical materialism. Spanning philosophy, parallax is then a rich and fruitful concept that can illuminate the studies of those working in epistemology, ontology, German Idealism, political philosophy and critical theory.

Dominik Finkelde is Professor of Epistemology and Contemporary Philosophy at the Munich School of Philosophy. He publishes on contemporary philosophy and German Idealism, especially on Hegel, Kant, Lacan, Frege, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Žižek and Badiou.

Christoph Menke is Professor for Practical Philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. His research focuses on political and legal philosophy, theories of subjectivity, ethics and aesthetics.

Slavoj Žižek is Professor at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London, UK. His recent publications include Hegel in a Wired Brain (2020), Sex and the Failed Absolute (2019), Disparities (2016), and Antigone (2016), all published by Bloomsbury.