Interview with Alenka Zupančič: Philosophy or Psychoanalysis? Yes, please! (original) (raw)

SUBJECT AND (POST)TRUTH BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOANALYSISAn Interview with Alenka Zupančič

Philosophy and society, 2021

How do we perceive the notion of subject today, and how the notion of truth? In the second half of the last century, it seemed that these two concepts have disappeared from the radar of theory, being marked as a residue of a sclero-sed metaphysical tradition by some currents of postmodernism and poststruc-turalism. Nevertheless, it seems that the contemporary context calls for their thorough requestioning. What can be said about these canonical philosophi-cal terms, without making mere repetitions or setting foundations for one of the numerous new ontologies? In which way we can think of contemporary transformations of subjectivity in the “era of post-truth”, when lie and truth, trust and mistrust, crises and security are intervowen in some kind of a hege-lian bad infinity. Which adequat critical tools for analysing are to be found in philosophy, and which ones in psychoanalysis? When those are complemen-tary, and when not? What can we still learn on subject and truth from Kant or Nietzsche, what from Freud and Lacan? Which insights from these authors have the potential to grasp the new normativity of our world?Alenka Zupančič is a renowned Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, professor and researcher at the Institute for Philosophy at the University of Nova Gorica and also a prominent figure of the psychoanalytic school of Lju-bljana. Zupančič writes and thinks on the axis of psychoanalytic theory and continental philosophy, working on the concepts such as real, ontology, un-conscious, hysteria, negation, lie, comedy, sexuality amongst others. Some of her books are entitled Ethics of Real: Kant and Lacan; (The odd one in: On Comedy; The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two and the last one published: What is Sex?

Ethics, Psychoanalysis, and Alenka Zupančič: Philosophizing in the "Modern" Time

Filocracia: An Online Journal of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies, 2015

This paper offers a discussion on the relatively new thoughts of Alenka Zupančič-a living philosopher, ethics thinker, and psychoanalyst. It offers an alternative response to a recurring question in philosophy-what does philosophy have to offer in our "modern" time? As Zupančič is working on several fields, this paper intertwines philosophy, ethics, and psychoanalysis. To be more organized and coherent, this paper is divided into three parts: 1) Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, 2) Alenka Zupančič and the Real, and 3) Analysis: The Real and Ethics .

Too Much of Not Enough: An Interview with Alenka Zupančič

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.

Sex, ontology, subjectivity: In conversation with Alenka Zupančič

Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 2015

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 differences with Alain Badiou's theory of the subject. She highlights her most recent work on Kant and offers a subtle critique of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean Laplanche. Zupančič lightens up the discussion somewhat by detailing an Ernst Lubitsch joke to illustrate the significance of the with-without for her Lacanian inspired ontology and in doing so points out why the sexes are not two in any meaningful way. Finally, the discussion closes with a candid and accessible commentary on being, multiplicity, and the One and its importance for a politics that is emphatic in its emphasis that it not take "nothing" or "non-being" for granted.

Conversation with Elisabeth Roudinesco, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 01/2019

Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 2019

JILL CHODER-GOLDMAN, LCSW In Global Perspectives, we bring you interviews with psychoanalysts from around the world in an effort to explore the influence of culture, politics, and socioeconomics on psychoanalytic training, theory development, clinical technique, and psychoanalytic practice in general. left my hotel in the 6th arrondissement and strolled south to Elisabeth Roudinesco’s apartment, passing through the famed Luxembourg Gardens. My walk was a fitting prelude to our conversation; I experienced a wonderful cross-section of the Parisian populace, a microcosm of the culture, if you will, in the beautiful setting of this classic French park. Men playing boulles, children playing football and tennis. Friends, young and old, were scattered about in garden chairs, in small groups, in animated discussions, reading or just enjoying the dappled sunlight of a late spring day. Dr. Roudinesco is a historian. She is also a psychoanalyst, but history is where her heart and passion lie. She was brought up with books, loves books, and when you walk into her home, you immediately feel the impact of her love of books, for it is filled from floor to ceiling with them: books on French history and philosophy, as well as autobiographies and biographies of well-known French historians, novelists, and psychoanalysts. The books are surrounded by plants of all sizes, both in her living area and on her outdoor balcony. Gardening is another one of her passions. I looked around before we began, thinking about how much she has not only read but written, for she is both a prolific reader and prolific writer, on topics ranging from the situation of psychoanalysis worldwide to the history of the French Revolution, perverts and perversion, Judaism and Auschwitz, and Lacan. Her most recent book, a biography of Freud, was prominently displayed on its own beautifully carved antique column. There was so much I wanted to talk about, but in the interest of time I tried to focus yet still include as many of her ideas as possible in our conversation.

The future of psychoanalysis at the edge of chaos. Interview: Joseph Dodds*, Liviu Poenaru

In Analysis, 2021

It could be argued that psychoanalysis constitutes the ‘‘unconscious’’ of schizoanalysis, just as Deleuze and Guattari’s writing might be viewed as exposing the unconscious of an overly hierarchical and authoritarian psychoanalysis. To paraphrase the ecopsychological formula (. . .), this might lead us to the strange position of claiming that ‘‘psychoanalysis needs schizoanalysis, and schizoanalysis needs psychoanalysis (. . .). We could thus understand psychoanalysis itself as at times functioning as what Deleuze and Guattari (2003) call a rhizome, with countless connections to diverse fields from neuroscience to economics, politics to gender theory, film studies to aesthetics, and the study of organizations and groups.’’. Joseph Dodds (2011, p. 112–113).