The article identifies a significant shift in conceptualizing the notion of representation found in contemporary philosophy and discusses some of its most crucial implications. The ontological and aesthetical critique of representation was one of the distinctive traits of 20th-century philosophy from Heidegger to Deleuze. In terms of this critique, representation no longer referred merely to a redoubling of reality, but above all to a principle governing its very construction – a principle based on the repression of something real. Artwork was seen in this context as capable of breaking with the principle of representation and expressing the real excluded from the construction of reality. Yet the critique of representation changes considerably with Badiou’s “subtractive” alternative to the Heideggerian “poetic” ontology and Ranciere’s view of the unlimited representation within the aesthetic regime of art as opposed to the codified and restricted representational regime. Instead of expressing something real that representation cannot account for, representation can only be counteracted by the occurrence of surplus representations that subvert the principles of the dominant regime of representation.
COBISS.SI-ID: 43886381
The aim of the book is to draw some implications from the thesis according to which there are two revolutions in the way of thinking at work in Kant’s philosophy. The result of the twofold “Copernican turn” in the Critique of Judgment is a new figure of the subject and the object that calls into question the correlation between the subject and the object as the crucial feature of Kant’s philosophy. At the same time, it introduces a radically novel concept of the relationship between the singular and the universal. ARRS recognised this book as an exceptional achievement in Slovenian science in 2012. The German edition is a modified translation of the Slovenian original.
COBISS.SI-ID: 43589165
The monograph takes the psychoanalytic (Freudian and Lacanian) notion of sexuality, as related to the unconscious, to be a properly philosophical, ontological problem of psychoanalysis. It argues that sexuality is the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental ontological negativity or minus, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The work explores the further consequences of this configuration, including its implications for a possible realist ontology, which, however, cannot bypass the concept of the subject. The monograph was met with a wide response: - The monograph is being translated into six languages. - A complete issue of the journal Continental Thought & Theory, Thinking Sex with Alenka Zupančič (http://ctt.canterbury.ac.nz/issues/vol-2-issue-2-june-2018-thinking-sex-with-alenka-zupancic/), is devoted to the monograph and the responses thereto. - An interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Too Much of Not Enough: An Interview with Alenka Zupancic”. (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/too-much-of-not-enough-an-interview-with-alenka-zupancic/) - An interview on the national television station, on the programme “Profil”, 4 December 2017. (http://4d.rtvslo.si/arhiv/profil/174506465) - A disscusion in the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb (Series »Philosophical theatre« hosted by Srećko Horvat), 13 January 2019. (https://www.hnk.hr/hr/novosti/alenka-zupančič-nova-gošć-filozofskog-teatra/)
COBISS.SI-ID: 42082605
Confronted by the hegemonic nominalist discourse characterised by its privileging of the multiple over the One and difference and/or otherness over the Same, the paper sets out from the assumption that the subversive gesture today consists in rehabilitating these two discredited philosophical notions: the One and the Same. The essay aims at contributing to an understanding of this thorny issue, and in particular at examining the political and theoretical impasses associated with the production of the universal in an infinite universe, a universe without a beyond. By teasing out the gist of the conceptualisations of the One and the Same, provided by Lacan and Badiou, respectively, the paper argues that the contemporary politics of emancipation can only fully deploy itself in the domain of the inconsistent, non-totalisable real of the social by starting with an axiom that equates the One and the “for all”. By developing what the author proposes to call the aleph of emancipation, contemporary theorisation of emancipation can reply to the persistent misunderstanding of the status of the universal in the not-all universe by some of the most perspicacious theorists, such as J.-C. Milner, F. Regnault, and G. Agamben.
COBISS.SI-ID: 42598189
The article considers the dynamics of mass migrations as could be observed in 2015 and 2016 in the context of the so-called refugee crisis in Europe. Departing from Agamben’s critique of the concept of human rights and the nation state, the author points out that the current refugee crisis has revealed an older contradiction between the concept of nation (deriving from the Latin verb naquere, “to give birth”) and the territorial presence of stateless people. This presence manifests the contingency of the biopolitical link between nation (birth), territory, and nation state . The massive presence and movement of stateless people within the territories of European nation states can thus be read as a peculiar type of the state of exception that Agamben has called (in accordance with Walter Benjamin) the messianic event. This exceptional event suspends the sovereign power of the nation state.
COBISS.SI-ID: 41426989
The text attempts to expose some parallels between the theoretical projects of Deleuze and Lacan. Despite many parallels, however, there is a fundamental difference that stems from the fact that Deleuze together with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus cut Lacan’s theory into two halves (objet petit a and the big Other) and in such a manner chose to go in the opposite direction from Lacan. It seems that in that way in general – despite some passages which prove to be exceptions to this general trend – he avoids what Lacan calls the “encounter with the real” which occurs for Lacan precisely as the “impossible that happens ”. This is most clearly visible in Deleuze’s critique of psychoanalysis, the unconscious, and Lacan’s conceptualisation of the real, which for late Lacan is the real without law. Here the text underlines the unexpected proximity of Jacques-Alain Miller’s recent text on the real in the 21st century to Deleuze. Finally, through a critique of Miller, another perspective on Lacan’s “law that changes” is suggested.
COBISS.SI-ID: 40711213
The monograph A-cogito is principally a study of the ontological status of the Cartesian cogito. The first part of the book consists of a systematic comparison of Descartes’ cogito to the so-called “anticipations” of the cogito argument in St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. What renders this investigation especially difficult is the fact that Descartes and Augustine not only share common ground – consisting of a proof of the irrefutability of our existence – but the two philosophies also coincide as two representatives of ontological dualism. In the second part of the book another question is set at the forefront: Is it conceivable that another crucial “anticipation” of the cogito exists? Namely, the self-consciousness of madness, such as it is represented in various art forms of the Northern Renaissance. On the basis of an analysis of Renaissance artworks, the monograph then attempts to extrapolate an argument that can arguably be regarded as an ontological proof of stupidity. The last part of the book consists of a theory of the grotesque, which relates to contemporary biopolitical theory.
COBISS.SI-ID: 287929600
The book examines the possibility of intervening in irreversible processes, i.e. intervening in processes which by their very notion appear to be irrevocable, and therefore immune to any subjective attempt at their undoing. In this respect, it reveals – through a discursive analysis of various manifestations of the crisis, by exploring the relationship between irreversibility and reversibility in psychoanalysis, by researching the issue of the end in modernist literature and popular culture – the unexpectedly crucial role occupied by the issue at the core of the current environmental crisis.
COBISS.SI-ID: 282716160
In 1543, Copernicus publicly defended the geokinetic and heliocentric universe. This book examines why and how he became a Copernican and what his affirmation of heliocentrism means in the context of the Scientific Revolution. A close reading of Copernicus’ texts and an examination of his sociocultural context reveals his commitment to the Platonist program of True Astronomy, which is to discover the well-proportioned, harmonious universe, hidden beyond visible appearances, but accessible through mathematical reasoning. The principal goal of the work is to show that the hypothesis of Copernicus’ Platonism brings unity and internal coherence to his project and provides the historical background of his contributions to the Scientific Revolution.
COBISS.SI-ID: 37042221
This book articulates a globalised world as one in which radical disparities in the distribution of wealth are being reproduced as the basis for depoliticised social, institutional, and ideological discourses. At its centre is a reorientation of global capitalism from the management of life towards making a surplus value from death. This change is presented as a reorientation of biopolitics toward necropolitics. Therefore, in the book we work with processes of change, of a historicisation of biopolitics and its turn into necropolitics that leads to a theoretical trajectory from M. Foucault to A. Mbembe.
COBISS.SI-ID: 37700397