Visiting Hegel at Dusk: A Conversation with Slavoj Zizek

This interview endeavors to understand Slavoj Zizek's philosophical theses on dialectical materialism from the point of view of aleatory materialism. The contents of the interview are philosophically based, despite detours through varied topics such as politics, ecology, and communism. Throughout, Zizek asserts Hegel's philosophical materialism, which has been overlooked by philosophers in general. Through dialectical retroactivity, Zizek maintains that we have finally found a nonteleological dialectics that is not external to Hegel but is found within his philosophy. Throughout the conversation, Zizek offers concrete examples to complex categories such as absolute recoil, which he defines as the cause being "an effect of its effects." In addition, Zizek presents what he sees as the deficiency in Althusser's aleatory materialism, that it represents, in his opinion, a simplistic interpretation of Hegel. Zizek believes that Hegel is the only true materialist alternative to Marx, who never managed to free himself from a teleological view of communism.