“Nightmare” is the word that keeps appearing in the recent onslaught of various crises, which now constitute something of a “serial crisis”: economic crises, covid pandemics, the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis, the climate crisis and the extreme weather events that accompany it, the drama in the Middle East… And it seems that very much like in the case of bad, traumatic dreams, we wake up, and proclaim to be awake, in order to be able to continue to dream, that is, to continue to exist untouched, undisturbed by the real that has just appeared. The lecture will explore how this relates to the Freudian notion of disavowal (Veleugnung) for which Octave Mannoni has provided a very succinct formula: “I know well, but all the same…” The perverse disavowal that sustains a belief by passionately proclaiming the knowledge of its opposite is becoming a dominant feature of our social and political life, going far beyond personal psychology.
moderated by: Ozren Pupovac
Alenka Zupančič is a Slovene philosopher and social theorist, one of the prominent members of the “Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis”. She works as Research Councilor at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences, Ljubljana. She is also professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, and is invited as guest lecturer to numerous universities worldwide. She is editor-in-chief of the Slovenian journal Problemi and the book series Analecta (published by the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana) and, together with Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, editor of the book series “Short Circuits” at MIT Press. Notable for her work on the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis, she is the author of numerous articles and many books, including Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan; The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two; The Odd One In: On Comedy; What is Sex? and Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax. Her books have been translated in many languages and appeared with acclaimed international publishers.
