Alenka Zupancic

• Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Alenka Zupančič poses the question of whether current identitarianism jeopardizes the very core of any emancipatory movement—its genuine political dimension. She argues that true political universality does not arise from viewing the social field as a neutral container of competing interests struggling for recognition. Rather, it comes from address...

The general perspective from which the book is written could be summarized with this simple question: What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? Why do all the numerous readings and rewritings of the play keep emerging? To what kind of (always) contemporary contradiction does the need, the urge to re-read and re-imagine Antigon...

The classic formula of disavowal given by Octave Mannoni, “I know well, but all the same,” undergoes interesting and far-reaching permutations in today’s social context. When it comes to dealing with and (not) responding to various crises, we usually point the finger at deniers and their “irrational” attitudes. However, far more common and socially...

Traducción del libro "Let Them Rot. Antigone's Parallax" (Fordham University Press, 2023) de Alenka Zupancic.

As much as humanity has always been driven by the idea of conquering death, it is also haunted by the impossibility of dying completely; that is, by a possible persistence and recurrence of something undead and indestructible that pertains to us; not necessarily as our ally, but rather as our enemy. This paper explores this strange non-coincidence...

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 vo...

Entrevista a la filósofa Alenka Zupancic sobre literatura, filosofía y teoría psicoanalítica. Publicada en español para la revista Demarcaciones, número 10.

Teorije zarote so zanimiv fenomen, ki ga ne moremo odpraviti s posmehljivim zamahom roke. V zadnjem času še toliko manj, saj tudi nekatere najbolj bizarne med njimi masovno vstopajo v javni prostor, v mainstream, celo v uradno politiko. Najbolj eklatanten primer je tu verjetno navezava QAnona na osebo in politiko Donalda Trumpa. Prispevek najprej a...

The talk will attempt to explore the nature of the division or cut implied, also etymologically, in the term “sex”. It will attempt to develop a concept of division that does not imply any pre-existing whole, but rather exists as a self-standing entity, endowed by a reality of its own. What if the division implied in “sex” is not simply that betwee...

When in 1989 Francis Fukuyama launched his thesis about the “end of history,” it rhymed perfectly with another fashionable suggestion about the “end of ideology.” This paper attempts to examine what could be called the ideology of the end, of which both of these trendy phrases partake. It looks particularly into the predominant modality both of the...

William James was the first to suggest that “dirt is matter out of place.” The chapter starts by examining the sufficiency of this definition in relation to jokes and comedy, and argues that the thesis is too short if we do not take into account the Freudian theory of repression. It focuses on a very particular kind of “dirt,” namely the enjoyment...

Wiele spośród ostatnich dyskusji filozoficznych naznaczył, w taki czy inny sposób, oszałamiający pod niejednym względem powrót do problematyki realizmu, zainicjowany przez książkę Quentina Meillassoux Après la finitude (2006) i kontynuowany przez szerszy, choć niejednolity ruch „spekulatywnego realizmu”. Artykuł podnosi kwestię czy ta debata dotyka...

In her latest book What is Sex? (MIT Press, 2017) Alenka Zupančič avoids such tiresome topics as heterosexual relationships or the gender binary (and gender altogether) and instead cogently explains sexual difference, the elusive “beyond” of the pleasure principle, infantile sexuality, the materiality of signifiers, the hole in being, the non-coinc...

Why sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Consider sublimation—conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual satisfaction. But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activitie...

This collection of essays explores laughter, humor, and the comic from a psychoanalytic perspective. Edited by two leading practicing psychoanalysts and with original contributions from Lacanian practitioners and scholars, this cutting-edge volume proposes a paradigm swerve, a Freudian slip on a banana peel. Psychoanalysis has long been associated...

This article deals with the way in which Michel Foucault first introduced the notion of 'biopolitics' through the referential frame of sexuality and psychoanalysis. It focuses on the concept that is utterly and conspicuously missing from Foucault's account, in The History of Sexuality, of the psychoanalytic take on sexuality - namely, the unconscio...

In this wide-ranging conversation, Alenka Zupančič engages with a number of important themes that animate her current work. Randall Terada begins by asking her first to address the striking connections in her work between sexuality, ontology, and the unconscious. Zupančič then moves on to the Lacanian theme of subjective destitution and her differe...

This paper explores some of the crucial ontological implications of the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality in its Freudo-Lacanian orientation. As irreducible to different sexual practices and contents, the concept of sexuality obtains conceptual weight that makes it particularly relevant for philosophical ontological thinking. Starting from the hyp...

The paper analyses two concepts, or conceptual operations, coming from very different traditions and contexts. One is Freud's concept of Verneinung, "negation", developed in his short yet extraordinary piece bearing the same title, and the other is the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung, "sublation", described by him as "one of the most important notions...

The paper focuses on Kant's formulation of the categorical imperative and on some of the paradoxes that different commentators have detected in it. It attempts to respond to these paradoxes by way of a reading of Kant that shifts the fundamental stakes of the formulation of the categorical imperative. It reads this formulation not as a criterion or...

The article deals with the logic of comedy and its inherent connection with the "functioning" of love (or better "the love which does work"). The comical along with laughter is a Nietzschean theme par excellence; love, on its turn, the most "tangible" figure of duality. Here "two" does not represent a pair or two people; it is a figure which resolv...

The paper examines the psychoanalytic (Freud, Lacan) displacement of ontology through its concept of sexuality. It thus turns around two principal questions. 1. What exactly is the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality? Everyone seems to know the answer to this, and the matter seems to be clear enough, yet this is far from being really the case, and t...

One of the conceptual events that distinguish the contemporary, post-Hegelian philosophy is the emergence of the concept of repetition as an independent and crucial concept. Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud and, later on, Lacan and Deleuze – with all these thinkers the conceptual stakes of repetition are very much in the center of their projects...

There is a famous section of The Contest of Faculties in which Kant discusses the affect that accompanied the (French) revolution in the souls of its spectators. He takes this affect - enthusiasm - to be the sign of that which, in the revolution, belongs to the dimension of the Event. Kant's essay constitutes the starting point of this paper, which...

In his general conception of philosophy, Alain Badiou insists on two issues: the first concerns the four conditions of philosophy (mathematics, politics, art and love), whereas the second refers to the principle according to which philosophy has to pull itself away from the immediate grip of its conditions, while nevertheless remaining within their...

Lacan's discussion of the ethics of psychoanalysis is closely connected to his discussion of tragedy, yet one must not forget that this connection is not an immediate one. Ethics, as well as tragedy, is approached in relation to another central notion, that of desire. Whatever link there is between ethics and tragedy, it springs from this notion. O...

Author(s): Alenka Zupančič | Аленка Зупанчич Title (English): On Love as Comedy Title (Macedonian): За љубовта како комедија Translated by (English to Macedonian): Natasha Stojanovska | Наташа Стојановска Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Summer 2003) Publisher: Research Center in Gender Studies...

Author(s): Alenka Zupančič | Аленка Зупанчич Title (English): The Act and Evil in Literature Title (Macedonian): Чинот и злото во литературата Translated by (English to Macedonian): Rodna Ruskovska | Родна Русковска Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter 2002) Publisher: Research Center in Gen...

Starting from the famous Nietzschean distinction between not willing and willing Nothing itself, the paper explores the status of nothingness and negativity in Nietzsche's philosophy. It suggests that Nietzsche is not simply hostile to negativity as such, but rather attempts to find a singular articulation of negativity, different from the one that...

Resumo: O presente artigo visa a discutir o lugar da sexualidade nos (des)encontros entre filosofia e psicanálise. Para isso, examina-se o estatuto da sexualidade na psicanálise, a fim de esboçar as linhas fundamentais de um argumento que poderia ser feito no que diz respeito às possíveis conseqüências ontológicas da postura psicanalítica. Abstract...