Pred nekaj leti ste marsikoga presenetili, ko ste zapustili redno mesto profesorja na ljubljanski filozofski fakulteti, da bi lahko končno živeli in delali kot filozof. Slišim, da se počasi spet vračate.
Letos prvič po dolgem času predavam v okviru novega podiplomskega programa psihoanaliza, za katerega je veliko zanimanje. Za to, da sem pred leti zapustil predavateljsko mesto, pri čemer sem čez čas vendarle sprejel mesto raziskovalca, je bilo krivih več dejavnikov, predvsem pa je bila odločilna skepsa do lastnega položaja v tem univerzitetnem sistemu in do načina, na katerega se je ta sistem začel razvijati. V nekem trenutku sem uvidel, da je položaj na fakulteti, ki sem si ga sam pridobil in zgradil, postal kletka.
LJUBLJANA – Z okroglo mizo na ljubljanski Metelkovi so obeležili ponovni izid študentskega časnika Tribuna. Mladen Dolar je spomnil na povezanost časnika s študentskim gibanjem v začetku 70. let, ko so z vsako številko “preizkušali meje”. Sandra Bašić Hrvatin je opozorila na pomen Tribune v času, ko pri večini časnikov vnaprej veš, kaj boš v njih bral.
What’s in A Voice?, a public lecture by Mladen Dolar on the occasion of Smadar Dreyfus Mother’s Day at Extra City Centre for Contemporary Art, Antwerp November 14 2008.
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Predavanje je nastalo kot posledica delovanja in projektov skupine SoOgledi, ki je v letu 2007 izvedla projekt HRUP_012 MB, sinhronizirano zvočno intervencijo skozi radijske postaje. V letošnjem letu skupina nadaljuje raziskovanje »hrupa« – tako s teoretsko obravnavo teme kot vzpodbujanjem in izvedbo umetniških projektov, ki bodo v določenem segmentu artikulirali »hrup« kot polucijski, ideološki in estetski dejavnik. Povabilo za predavanje Mladenu Dolarju in njegova izvedba predstavlja izhodiščno točko filozofsko teoretske obravnave glasu in hrupa.
Predavanje filozofa in psihoanalitika Mladena Dolarja bo najprej skušalo orisati fenomenologijo zvoka s poudarkom na razmerju med glasom in hrupom oz. odgovoriti na vprašanje, kako se človeški glas izdvaja iz širokega spektra zvočnosti in kakšne paradokse predstavlja. Ob tem se bomo dotaknili novih tehnologij reprodukcije zvoka in so kaj so le-te doprinesle v zvočni univerzum ter kako so ga spremenile. V drugem delu bo v središču znana knjiga Jacquesa Attalija, Hrup (slovenski prevod v pripravi). Predavanje bo skušalo podati oris tega, kar Attali imenuje ‘politična ekonomija hrupa’ in kratek oris zgodovine hrupa ter zastavilo vprašanje uporabe hrupa v umetnostnih praksah in nasledke razumevanja hrupa za razumevanje sveta.
24. april 2008 ob 18.00
Umetnostna galerija Maribor
This collection is the first extended interrogation in any language of Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XVII. Originally delivered just after the Paris uprisings of May 1968, Seminar XVII marked a turning point in Lacan’s thought; it was both a step forward in the psychoanalytic debates and an important contribution to social and political issues. Collecting important analyses by many of the major Lacanian theorists and practitioners, this anthology is at once an introduction, critique, and extension of Lacan’s influential ideas.
The contributors examine Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, his critique of the Oedipus complex and the superego, the role of primal affects in political life, and his prophetic grasp of twenty-first-century developments. They take up these issues in detail, illuminating the Lacanian concepts with in-depth discussions of shame and guilt, literature and intimacy, femininity, perversion, authority and revolt, and the discourse of marketing and political rhetoric. Topics of more specific psychoanalytic interest include the role of objet a, philosophy and psychoanalysis, the status of knowledge, and the relation between psychoanalytic practices and the modern university.
The giant of Ljubljana marshals some of the greatest thinkers of our age in support of a dazzling re-evaluation of Jacques Lacan.
It is well known that Jacques Lacan developed his ideas in dialogue with major European thought and art, past and present. Yet what if there is another frame of reference, rarely or never mentioned by Lacan, which influenced his thinking, and is crucial to its proper understanding? Žižek focuses on Lacan’s “silent partners,” those who provide a key to Lacanian theory, discussing his work in relation to the Pre-Socratics, Diderot, Hegel, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Wagner, Turgenev, Kafka, Henry James, Artaud and Kiarostami.
As Žižek says, “The ultimate aim of the present volume is to instigate a new wave of Lacanian paranoia: to push readers to engage in the work of their own and start to discern Lacanian motifs everywhere, from politics to trash culture, from obscure ancient philosophers to contemporary Iranian filmmakers.”
Plutarch tells the story of a man who plucked a nightingale and finding but little to eat exclaimed: “You are just a voice and nothing more.” Plucking the feathers of meaning that cover the voice, dismantling the body from which the voice seems to emanate, resisting the Sirens’ song of fascination with the voice, concentrating on “the voice and nothing more”: this is the difficult task that philosopher Mladen Dolar relentlessly pursues in this seminal work.
The voice did not figure as a major philosophical topic until the 1960s, when Derrida and Lacan separately proposed it as a central theoretical concern. In A Voice and Nothing More Dolar goes beyond Derrida’s idea of “phonocentrism” and revives and develops Lacan’s claim that the voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object (objet a). Dolar proposes that, apart from the two commonly understood uses of the voice as a vehicle of meaning and as a source of aesthetic admiration, there is a third level of understanding: the voice as an object that can be seen as the lever of thought. He investigates the object voice on a number of different levels—the linguistics of the voice, the metaphysics of the voice, the ethics of the voice (with the voice of conscience), the paradoxical relation between the voice and the body, the politics of the voice—and he scrutinizes the uses of the voice in Freud and Kafka. With this foundational work, Dolar gives us a philosophically grounded theory of the voice as a Lacanian object-cause.
“Mladen Dolar acts as if he is not an idiot and looks as if he is not an idiot, but this should not deceive you—he is NOT an idiot!” —Slavoj Žižek
Deleuze himself, who was an avid reader and an accurate analytic of philosophical texts (of Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzche, Bergson..) once said about his writings that he was trying to make a child to that specific philosopher, such that it will immanently follow from the philosophers opus, but totally displaced and transformed, so the philosopher would not want to take it as his own. And in this Deleuzian sense we could say, that Žižek did exactly this, that is made Deleuze a child which he couldn’t deny, but one which he wouldn’t be happy to see either. That’s why we are happy, the readers.
This text still needs revision. I hastily translated it, but an updated version with all of the grammatical corrections will be uploaded soon.
Opera’s Second Death is a passionate exploration of opera – the genre, its masterpieces, and the nature of death. Using a dazzling array of tools, Slavoj Žižek and coauthor Mladen Dolar explore the strange compulsions that overpower characters in Mozart and Wagner, as well as our own desires to die and to go to the opera.
An engaging critique of Western misconceptions about the mysterious East. Edward Said’s Orientalism has been much praised for its account of Western perceptions of the Orient. But the English-speaking world has for too long been unaware of another classic in the same field which appeared in France only a year later. Alain Grosrichard’s The Sultan’s Court is a fascinating survey of Western accounts of “Oriental despotism” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It focuses particularly on portrayals of the Ottoman Empire and the supposedly enigmatic structure of the despot’s court — the seraglio — with its viziers, janissaries, mutes, dwarfs, eunuchs and countless wives.. Drawing on the writing of Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, Grosrichard examines their intense fascination with the seraglio He describes the way in which they constructed a fantasized Other in contrast to their own projections of a rational society. The Sultan’s Court explores the nature of these fantasies and what they reveal about the foundations of modern political thought.
What Said’s Orientalism achieves in breadth, The Sultan’s Court provides in depth: the precise outline — the elementary formula — of the sexual-political fantasy of “Oriental Despotism” which structures our perception of the Muslim countries from the seventeenth century to our own times. – Slavoj Žižek
The Cartesian cogito—the principle articulated by Descartes that “I think, therefore I am”—is often hailed as the precursor of modern science. At the same time, the cogito’s agent, the ego, is sometimes feared as the agency of manipulative domination responsible for all present woes, from patriarchal oppression to ecological catastrophes. Without psychoanalyzing philosophy, Cogito and the Unconscious explores the vicissitudes of the cogito and shows that psychoanalyses can render visible a constitutive madness within modern philosophy, the point at which “I think, therefore I am” becomes obsessional neurosis characterized by “If I stop thinking, I will cease to exist.”
Noting that for Lacan the Cartesian construct is the same as the Freudian “subject of the unconscious,” the contributors follow Lacan’s plea for a psychoanalytic return to the cogito. Along the path of this return, they examine the ethical attitude that befits modern subjectivity, the inherent sexualization of modern subjectivity, the impasse in which the Cartesian project becomes involved given the enigmatic status of the human body, and the Cartesian subject’s confrontation with its modern critics, including Althusser, Bataille, and Dennett. In a style that has become familiar to Žižek’s readers, these essays bring together a strict conceptual analysis and an approach to a wide range of cultural and ideological phenomena—from the sadist paradoxes of Kant’s moral philosophy to the universe of Ayn Rand’s novels, from the question “Which, if any, is the sex of the cogito?” to the defense of the cogito against the onslaught of cognitive sciences.
Challenging us to reconsider fundamental notions of human consciousness and modern subjectivity, this is a book whose very Lacanian orthodoxy makes it irreverently transgressive of predominant theoretical paradigms. Cogito and the Unconscious will appeal to readers interested in philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and theories of ideology.
The gaze entices, inspects, fascinates. The voice hypnotizes, seduces, disarms. Are gaze and voice part of the relationship we call love . . . or hate? If so, what part? How do they function? This provocative book examines love as the mediating entity in the essential antagonism between the sexes, and gaze and voice as love’s medium. The contributors proceed from the Lacanian premise that “there is no sexual relationship,” that the sexes are in no way complementary and that love—figured in the gaze and the voice —embodies the promise and impossibility of any relation between them.
The first detailed Lacanian elaboration of this topic, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects examines the status of gaze, voice, and love in philosophy from Plato to Kant, in ideology from early Christianity to contemporary cynicism, in music from Hildegard of Bingen to Richard Wagner, in literature from Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and in cinema from Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom to Kieslowski’s A Short Film on Love. Throughout, the contributors seek to show that the conflict between the sexes is the site of a larger battle over the destiny of modernity. With insights into the underlying target of racist and sexist violence, this book offers surprising revelations into the nature of an ancient enigma—love.
Approaching its topic with utter disregard for predominant multiculturalist and deconstructionist commonplaces, this volume will be indispensable for anyone interested in the uses of psychoanalysis for philosophy, cultural studies, and the analysis of ideology.
A modernist work of art is by definition ‘incomprehensible’; it functions as a shock, as the irruption of a trauma which undermines the complacency of our daily routine and resists being integrated. What postmodernism does, however, is the very opposite: it objects par excellence are products with mass appeal; the aim of the postmodernist treatment is to estrange their initial homeliness: ‘you think what you see is a simple melodrama your granny would have no difficulty in following? Yet without taking into account the difference between symptom and sinthom/the structure of the Borromean knot/the fact that Woman is one of the Names-of-the-Father …you’ve totally missed the point!’ if there is an author whose name epitomises this interpretive pleasure of ‘estranging’ the most banal content, it is Alfred Hitchcock (and – useless to deny it – this book partakes unrestrainedly in this madness).’ Hitchcock is placed on the analyst’s couch in this extraordinary volume of case studies, as its contributors bring to bear an unrivalled enthusiasm and theoretical sweep on the entire Hitchcock oeuvre, from Rear Window to Psycho, as an exemplar of ‘postmodern’ defamiliarization. Starting from the premise that ‘everything has meaning’, the films’ ostensible narrative content and formal procedures are analysed to reveal a rich proliferation of ideological and psychical mechanisms at work. But Hitchcock is here to lure the reader into ’serious’ Marxist and Lacanian considerations on the construction of meaning. Timely, provocative and original, this is sure to become a landmark of Hitchcock studies.
