Too Much of Not Enough: An Interview with Alenka Zupančič (original) (raw)

ALENKA ZUPANČIČ is professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School and at the University of Nova Gorica in Slovenia. She is a preeminent scholar in the Ljubljana School of psychoanalysis, founded in the late 1970s by Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, and others, which draws together Marxism, German idealism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to facilitate — much like an analyst — a mode of “listening” to sociocultural phenomena. Members of the school deploy linguistic theory to cast light (and shadows) on history, politics, art, literature, and cinema. In her early work, such as her 2000 book Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan, Zupančič sought to link trends in continental philosophy with the insights of contemporary psychoanalysis. In 2008, she published The Odd One In: On Comedy, which applies philosophical and psychoanalytic insights to the processes at work in the practice of comedy. She also draws together Kant, comedy, and psychoanalysis in her ambitious book Why Psychoanalysis?: Three Interventions (2008). Her critical project explores the relations between the sexual and the ontological, the comedic and the unconscious, the ethical and the political. I spoke with Zupančič about her new book, What IS Sex? (2017), in which she argues that sex is the place of meeting between epistemology and ontology, the messy net that spans the gap between knowing and being. (Her colleague Žižek’s own 2017 volume, Incontinence of the Void, is a response to her book.) What IS Sex? models for us a way to glimpse — and draw into the light — that hidden, obscure, and mysterious entity, the unconscious.