Alenka Zupančič

Kant, sober Enlightenment thinker and philosopher's philosopher, seems the very antithesis of Lacan, the "wild theorist" of psychoanalysis. But, drawing on a wide range of writers from Sophocles to de Sade, Alenka Zupancic here demonstrates that the two thinkers stake everything on a similar ethical enterprise. For both, ethics is a necessary impossibility-impossible because of the infinite and inhuman demands it makes on us. Moreover, both are thinkers of desire, of the ethics of desire and the desire for ethics.

Kant, Lacan

Ethics of the Real

In Why Psychoanalysis, Alenka Zupancic outlines the relationship between the ontological, the ethical and the aesthetical spheres of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In three bold interventions she investigates the question of Being, Freedom and Comedy. Taking her departure from issues of sex, cause, and horror Zupancic reinterprets Kant's philosophical categories and outlines a unique theory of the subjekt. Why Psychoanalysis continues her seminal work Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan from 2000 and links it with more recent work about comedy. Why Psychoanalysis is suitable for beginners as well as for more advanced readers.

Three Interventions

Why Psychoanalysis?

Alenka (Senior Research Fellow Zupancic, Filozofski Institut ZRC SAZU)

Why philosophize about comedy? What is the use of investigating the comical fromphilosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives? In The Odd One In, Alenka Zupancic [haceks over bothcs] considers how philosophy and psychoanalysis can help us understand the movement and the logicinvolved in the practice of comedy, and how comedy can help philosophy and psychoanalysis recognizesome of the crucial mechanisms and vicissitudes of what is called humanity. Comedy by its nature isdifficult to pin down with concepts and definitions, but as artistic form and social practice comedyis a mode of tarrying with a foreign object--of including the exception. Philosophy's relationshipto comedy, Zupancic [haceks over both cs] writes, is not exactly a simple story (and indeed includessome elements of comedy). It could begin with the lost book of Aristotle's Poetics, which discussedcomedy and laughter (and was made famous by Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose). But Zupancic[haceks over both cs] draws on a whole range of philosophers and exemplars of comedy, fromAristophanes, Molière, Hegel, Freud, and Lacan to George W. Bush and Borat. She distinguishesincisively between comedy and ideologically imposed, "naturalized" cheerfulness. Real,subversive comedy thrives on the short circuits that establish an immediate connection betweenheterogeneous orders. Zupancic [haceks over both cs] examines the mechanisms and processes by whichcomedy lets the odd one in. Alenka Zupancic [haceks over both cs] is Senior Research Fellow at theInstitute of Philosophy, Slovene Academy of Sciences, Ljubljana. She is the author of The ShortestShadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (MIT Press, 2003).

On Comedy

The Odd One in

Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax

Antigone's Parallax

Let Them Rot

Alenka Zupancic

Borut Zupancic

The idea of Kantian ethics is both simple and revolutionary: it proposes a moral law independent of any notion of a pre-establishment of fear. In attempting to interpret sucha a revcolutionary proposition in a more 'humane' light, and to turn Kant into our contemporary—someone who can help us with our own ethical dilemmas—many Kantian scholars have glossed over its apparent paradoxes and impossible claims. This book is concerned with doing exactly the opposite. Kant, thank God, is not our contemporary; he stands against the grain of our times. Lacan on the face of it appears to be the very antithesis of Kant—the wild theorist of psychoanalysis compared to the sober Enlightenment figure. His concept of the Real, however, provides perhaps the most useful backdrop to this new interpretation of Kantian ethics. Constantly juxtaposing her readings of the two philosophers, Alenka Zupancic summons up and 'ethics of the Real', and clears the ground for a radical restoration of the disruptive element in ethics.

Kant and Lacan

üç müdahale

Neden Psikanaliz?

Alenka Zupančič

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