Simon Gros

---

In this book Joseph Carew takes up the central question guiding Slavoj Žižek’s philosophy: How could something like phenomenal reality emerge out of the meaninglessness of the Real?

Carefully reconstructing and expanding upon his controversial reactualization of German Idealism, Carew argues that Žižek offers us an original, but perhaps terrifying, response: experience is possible only if we presuppose a prior moment of breakdown as the ontogenetic basis of subjectivity.

Drawing upon resources found in Žižek, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and post-Kantian philosophy, Carew thus develops a new critical metaphysics—a metaphysics which is a variation upon the late German Idealist theme of balancing system and freedom, realism and idealism, in a single, self-reflexive theoretical construct—that challenges our understanding of nature, culture, and the ultimate structure of reality.

---

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Metaphysical Archaeology of the Psychoanalytico-Cartesian Subject

PART I: DEATH DRIVE
1. The Madness of the Symbolic: Transcendental Materialism and the Ambiguity of the Real
2. Grasping the Vanishing Mediator Between the Real and the Ideal: Žižek and the Unconscious Truth of German Idealism
3. Psychoanalysis and the Enigma of Transcendental Subjectivity: Towards a New Materialism
4. The Problem of Nature in the Lacanian Subject: The Obscure Origins of the Symbolic

PART II: NATURE TORN APART
5. Kant, Todestrieb, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle: The Unruly Basis of Transcendental Freedom
6. From Transcendental Philosophy to Substance as Subject: Hegel and the Psychotic Night of the World
7. The Logic of Transcendental Materialism: Schelling and the Spectral Other Side of German Idealism
8. When the World Opens its Eyes: The Traumatic Fissure of Ontological Catastrophe
9. The Abyss of Unconscious Decision: Schelling’s Weltalter and Psychoanalytical Horror of Substance as Subject
10. Radicalizing the Subject: Substance Gasping for Breath, the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics, and the Žižekian Unconscious

PART III: OVERCOMING IDEALISM
11. From Radical Idealism to Critical Metaphysics: How Idealists Write Being’s Poem
12. The Deadlocks of Ontological Catastrophe: The Cases of Naturphilosophie, Anton-Babinski Syndrome, and Tarte à la crème

---

DOWNLOAD: (.pdf)