CHAPTER ONE
‘The Unconscious is Structured as Yugoslavia’
On 29 September 1989, the alternative weekly journal Mladina featured a humorous half-page article, entitled ‘The Unconscious is structured as Yugoslavia’ (Dolar 1989). Mladen Dolar, author of the funny metaphor and the article, tried to mockingly show that a contingent selection of Yugoslav places and people contributed to the making of Freud’s psychoanalysis. As Freud recalled at the beginning of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud 2010), it was during a debate with a fellow passenger on a train trip from Dubrovnik to some station in Herzegovina that he could not remember the name ‘Signorelli’. This incident in analysis provided a key idea for both the The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 2009), published only a year earlier. A series of associations that caused the suppression of the Italian painter’s name was linked to the topics of death and sexuality and with the awkward and even deadly obsession that, according to Freud, Turks allegedly had with sexual pleasures. In another case, described in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 2009), Freud recalled that in Montenegrin Kotor, he missed a wonderful opportunity (he never specified what that opportunity was) and the memory of this led him to recall a thought from his dreams that ‘one shouldn’t miss any opportunity’. There is another reference to the ‘locale’ in a further analysis of these dreams, namely, Freud recalls an awkward reaction of a certain ‘Popović’ when he had to present himself with the surname that obviously sounded amusing to a German speaker and linked these dreams to anal connotations. ‘Last, but not least’, adds Dolar in his article (Dolar 1989), after Turks, Dalmatia, Herzegovina and a Popović, we also find a Slovenian in Freud’s biography. In a letter to Weiss, Freud mentions a patient whom Weiss treated for impotence, but eventually realized that he was only pretending to have a problem in order to make some profit. Freud advises Weiss not to waste effort on people like that, for they cannot be analysed, their psyche being led by dynamic relationships that even psychoanalysis was not yet able to understand. The missed opportunity in Montenegrin Kotor, the unanalysable Slovenian imposter and the section of the Herzegovian railway trails, where Freud got his key idea – all these contributed to the system that Freud, a fellow Austro-Hungarian citizen, set up in his subsequent texts. Even more, says Dolar, Yugoslavia and the Balkans were in a sense, the unconscious of Freud’s Europe, ‘a locus of Freudian suppression, a place where everything that a “normal European” must suppress, returns; a weird place of forgotten things and missed opportunities, secrets of sexuality and death, things obscene and anal . . .’ (Dolar 1989: 16).
A similar metaphor can be used for the purpose of this book. It cannot be claimed that the making of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis was somehow predetermined by the contingencies of time and place in which it developed. Socialist Yugoslavia has, however, with its own missed opportunities, funny surnames and railway journeys, doubtlessly contributed to the making of the Ljubljana school. The introductory chapter will thus provide a brief overview of the events and trends on the Slovenian cultural scene before and during the intellectual ferment that brought about the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis.1 The heterogeneity of different literary scenes, the intellectual clashes between journals, the sporadic translational undertakings, the variety of cultural happenings and, last but not least, the subtle differences in different kinds of relationships to the official politics and its institutions, all constitute a background from which the Ljubljana School grew.
The choice of the time span in this introduction is, first and foremost, biographical. It begins with the first published articles by Slavoj Žižek, the oldest of the three protagonists of the Ljubljana School, and ends in the early 1990s, with the first publications by Zupančič on Lacanian topics. In between these two temporal boundaries, the social and political reality in Slovenia had fundamentally changed. The fact that, on the way from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, one state gradually replaced the other might be the most obvious and well known of these changes, but for our intended topic it isn’t the most important one. The changes that caused and accompanied the dismemberment of the Yugoslav state also had other consequences; they profoundly changed the cultural and intellectual sphere and their relations to what was going on in Europe and the world.
Waiting for the match to be cancelled
The 1950s and early 1960s in Yugoslavia were a period of economic prosperity and considerable political liberalization. The system of self-management, which differed from the Soviet model of central planning and state ownership of industry, endured through its first decade with reasonable success. The Yugoslav economy also profited from its political position between the two sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’, being able to export its produce to and establish good economic cooperation with countries from both sides. Yugoslavia started to consolidate its place in the global balance of powers and attempted to become a key member of the Non-Aligned Movement, established in the early 1960s. One of the last obstacles on the path of the political and economic liberalizers was removed in 1966 with the fall from power of their chief opponent, the Minister of the Interior and head of the military intelligence and secret police, Aleksandar Ranković (Pirjevec 1995).
This brief period of liberalization and prosperity ended in the mid-1960s, when – as result of a series of inadequate measures and interventions – an economic crisis began to emerge. Mammoth state firms were unable to survive without extensive funding from the state and many collapsed under the increased pressure of the liberalized economy. Their failure and the stress it placed on the state economy resulted in inflation, a rise in prices, a series of strikes and increasing unemployment rates. During the same period, new political processes started to take place. In the spring and early summer of 1968, in addition to the internal crisis, two international episodes rattled the political scene: the May events in France and the Prague Spring. In July 1968, in response to these international stimuli and as a criticism of the situation within the country, a series of student demonstrations overtook the Yugoslav universities. Students were critical of the negative effects of the economic liberalization, the increasing social differentiation and unemployment rates, a situation that was especially difficult for socially underprivileged students and new graduates. In the capital cities of the federal republics, students took to the streets and occupied universities, establishing autonomous academic zones. Building on the topics that these early demonstrations invoked, a group of intellectuals, gathered around the Praxis movement in Zagreb and Belgrade, began to give the student revolt a larger ideological meaning. The Praxis movement was a group of intellectuals that successfully led the famous Korčula Summer School (1963–74), witnessed the core of the crisis in the bureaucratization of Yugoslav socialism and advocated for the return to the ‘young Marx’ (Marx 1992a, 1992b) and the idea of praxis. They also strongly opposed the newly emerging nationalisms – although a few decades later, some of them unfortunately changed their mind. The protests against the ‘red bourgeoisie’ met the fiercest police reaction in Belgrade when in an incident at a ‘podvožnjak’ (underpass), a couple of students were killed and many were left wounded. The student movement was finally addressed by Tito who managed to calm the students with a (false) promise to consider their proposals.
Another obvious trend during the late 1960s was an increasingly strong emphasis on issues of ethnicity. Allegedly loyal to the official principle of ‘brotherhood and unity’, nations and nationalities2 started to emphasize their nationhood and to strive for equal participation in the political sphere – although they did not always agree on how this equality should be achieved. As early as 1966, linguistic movements started to appear; Slovenians and Macedonians opposed the use of Serbo-Croatian as the operational language of the federation, while both Serbs and Croats struggled to achieve a separation of the two languages that were previously considered to be two dialects of the same Serbo-Croat language. The conflicts escalated during 1969, when the Slovenian government first protested against the federal budget priorities in the so-called ‘highway affair’ and next it was Croat and Serb intellectuals and politicians who got involved in a long series of mutual accusations of burgeoning nationalism. The state also progressively began to be governed according to the nation principle, each nation and nationality being given an equal share of votes, regardless of the difference in their population size (Pirjevec 1995).
Both of the problematic issues, the increased ethnic tensions and the worsening of the economic crisis, were exacerbated during the early 1970s. As we will see, this was a crucial period in the formation of the ‘Slovenian Lacan’ for both Dolar and Žižek (Dolar et al. 2014). The decade, however, began on an optimistic note. For a while, it seemed that Tito had managed to consolidate the Yugoslav position in world politics. The Lusaka conference of the Non-Aligned Movement established the doctrine of peaceful coexistence that was later accepted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in autumn 1970. The importance of the Yugoslav position seemed further confirmed by Nixon’s visit and Tito’s trip to five European Economic Community (EEC) countries and subsequent visits by Willy Brandt and Queen Elizabeth. Trouble in the internal affairs of Yugoslavia, however, continued to worsen.
Party politics started to change dramatically and, in the first half of the 1970s, it began to shift back towards the centralized model of government and the principle of state control over the economy. A new organizational principle in the economy, that is, ‘associated labour’, started to emerge in order to counter the liberalized ‘firms’, and the protagonists of liberalization were progressively being accused of ruining the economic and sociopolitical situation of the state and perverting the system of self-management. Confrontation with the liberals began in 1972 and in the process the leaderships of Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Vojvodina and Macedonia were replaced. Later, we will see how this return to centralized politics affects Dolar and Žižek’s work in the university (Dolar et al. 2014).
The new Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) constitution, ratified in 1974, confirmed the shift towards ‘Basic Organizations of Associated Labour’ (TOZD) that became the organizational building blocks for the entire political and economic system and also had an electoral function. The 1974 constitution also confirmed the equal representational system for the republics and the collective presidency with a rotating presidency. After the constitution was ratified, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) began to reaffirm its central position at the Xth Congress, while also strengthening its link with the army. In preparation for the ‘match to be cancelled’ – as was the high officials’ code for Tito’s death (Pirjevec 1995), for the first time after Ranković’s fall, the state security agency also started to regain its importance and power. In 1975, a new, stricter penal code was issued, including the much disputed Article 133, concerning so-called ‘hostile propaganda’ and ‘counterrevolutionary activity’, euphemisms that served as a pretext for the persecution of political opponents throughout the 1980s. We will see this impacting directly on our philosophical protagonists during the so-called ‘Punk Problemi’ affair between 1981 and 1983, with accusations and charges of propagandizing for ‘neo-Nazism’ (Žižek 1981; Dolar 1982; Motoh 2012).
The mid-1970s brought a new set of problems at the international level. Yugoslav relations with both the USSR and the USA started to deteriorate and the stability of these relations was further shaken by the re-establishment of Yugoslav relations with China, after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Yugoslavia, acting in accordance with its newly established friendship with Hua Guofeng’s China, fiercely opposed the Vietnamese invasion of Pol Pot’s Kampuchea and thereby provoked the USSR. In his last year of life, Tito tried to settle the dispute with the Soviets, but his May 1979 visit to Moscow was unsuccessful. In the late 1970s, the Non-Aligned Movement also started to be affected by the Soviet–Yugoslav struggle. The rivalry between Tito and Castro, the latter acting on behalf of the Soviet side, escalated at the 1979 Non-Aligned conference in Havana, where the Soviet cause prevailed and the inter-block neutrality of the organization was irretrievably lost (Pirjevec 1995).
The emergence of nationalism
Early in 1980, Tito fell very ill and, in preparation for his death, additional measures were taken to ensure a stable period of transition. The army and the security service were geared up and a ‘committee for the defense of the constitutional order’ was established to prevent either a foreign intervention or an inside coup. Tito died on 4 May that same year and after his death – and spectacular mourning procedures – old problems started to resurface. The economic crisis worsened and the International Monetary Fund conditioned the new package of loans with demands for harsh economic measures that were largely unsuccessful. One of these was the devaluation of the Yugoslav currency, the dinar, against the US dollar, which only further divided the country. The saving measures, however, were not successful and the economic crisis progressively worsened. Different diagnoses were given for the situation: some accused the decentralization process established by the 1974 constitution, some blamed it on the inequalities between the federal republics, some accused the liberalizers’ reforms etc. In the early 1980s, nationalist tendencies within the federal republics radicalized, openly nationalistic demonstrations occurred and several books on the topic were published – and consequently banned. Tensions in Kosovo, which at the time was one of the two independent regions within the Serbian federal republic, also started to worsen soon after Tito’s death. The demonstrations of Albanians in March 1981 demanded equal rights for the Albanian minority and the change of their status into one of the nations of the federation. The situation got even worse in 1985 when tensions became openly violent in Belgrade and Kosovo. The crucial shift for both Serbian nationalism and the situation in Kosovo happened in February 1986, when Milošević succeeded in taking over the Serbian League of Communists (LC) leadership. The former leadership, which was very critical towards Serbian nationalism, was removed from power and the new orientation in Serbian LC politics became evident in the second half of the decade (Pirjevec 1995; Repe 2002).
In the months following Tito’s death, critical intellectuals started to raise the issue of censorship and Article 133 of the penal code that criminalized any so-called ‘verbal act’ against the integrity of the state. The censorship of publications, however, started to loosen. First, critical books were published on issues such as the post-war labour camps for political prisoners and the role of the Communist Party in the struggle with other political parties during and after World War II. Political critics of the 1950s, such as Djilas, became active again and the first open criticisms of the Yugoslav National Army appeared, combined with the demand for the possibility of an alternative service to the 1-year-long military conscription. In May 1985, at the parade on the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the SFRY, another signal was given to the emerging political and cultural movements: a group of anti-militarist demonstrators showed up at the parade while the state organs refrained from sanctioning their protest (Pirjevec 1995).
While the economic crisis worsened, nationalist tensions grew and emerging alternative political and cultural movements started to appear, which we will see is a crucial aspect of our story about the ‘Slovenian Lacan’. As Močnik (1993) and others have described, it was the relationship between the ‘alternative culture’ (bypassing ‘civil society’) and the ‘younger intellectuals’ which, in effect, gave rise to the emergence of Lacanianism as the distinctive aspect of the Ljubljana scene. This Lacanian orientation is present not simply in the philosophical approaches but also, as we will see, in the alternative culture phenomena, most especially and explicitly in Laibach, IRWIN and the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) (Monroe 2005), as well as more implicitly in the earlier punk movements and the FV 112/15 art scene (Motoh 2012).
An important shift marked the official politics of the mid-1980s as well. Within the LCs of the federal republics, most notably in Slovenia and Serbia, a generational shift took place among the high party officials. The new generation of leaders, such as Slobodan Milošević in Serbia and Milan Kučan in Slovenia, grew up after the war and hadn’t participated in the partisan movement or in the controversies of the 1940s and 1950s. At the same time, the intellectual elites of the federal republics started to openly promote national issues. Milošević, newly affirmed president of the Serbian LC, managed to turn the orientation of the Serbian LC from a more centralist towards a more nationalist direction. While a more nationalist orientation prevailed in Serbia, political changes started to happen in Slovenia as well. The first attempts at forming political parties (at the time still called ‘unions’) resulted in the establishment of the Slovenian Peasant Union (SKZ; later to become the Slovenian People’s Party) in May 1988, and other similar associations soon followed, all in the space of 2 years. Some of these – the Social Democrats, Democratic Union, Christian Democrats and partly Peasant Union – later joined to form a coalition of oppositional parties, called DEMOS. This restructuring was enabled by the changes made by the Slovenian LC, from the beginning of 1989 onwards. They officially accepted the interpretation according to which the crisis in Yugoslavia was only a symptom of the general crisis of the European socialist countries and they expressed their willingness to give up their political monopoly and introduce political pluralism in order to achieve the democratization of the state and society. The existence of political parties was officially confirmed by the Slovenian parliament in the last days of 1989.
These changes, among other reasons, also increased the tensions between Slovenia and the federation. If, in the late 1980s, it still seemed that the national and inter-federal squabbles could be solved by either centralist intervention – advocated by the Serbian LC – or by confederalist reforms – advocated by Slovenian politics – in 1990, it became painfully clear that a solution to the conflicts was very unlikely. New political parties started to emerge in other republics as well, first in Croatia, where the most prominent of those became the conservative and nationalist Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), then in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and finally even in Serbia, where Milošević’s Socialist Party of Serbia became the most prominent. Milošević is a constant reference point for the later philosophical analyses of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, for example, in Dolar’s (2006) paradigmatic text on the ‘voice’, where Milošević’s manipulation of the Serbian mass rally is interpreted as a crucial index for the relation between psychoanalysis and sociopolitical critique (Dolar 2006).
The April elections in Slovenia were won by a coalition of oppositional parties, called DEMOS with Prime Minister Lojze Peterle from the Christian Democrat Party. While former oppositional parties got the majority in the assembly, it was a candidate of the former LC, Milan Kučan, who became the president of the Republic of Slovenia (Žižek never actually ran for the position of president, as is often erroneously supposed).3 The Slovenian elections were followed by those in Croatia the same month and, later in the year, in all other federal republics. At the end of December 1990, Slovenia held a plebiscite on the question of whether the Republic of Slovenia should become an independent and sovereign state. The result was almost unequivocal: of all Slovenians eligible to vote, 88.5 per cent voted for independence. In January, Slovenia also started to apply measures to cut financial ties with the federal reserves and federal banks and to separately run their tax system and customs (Repe 2002).
The first half of 1991 was marked by preparations for the official proclamation of independence, but at the same time, the first serious ethnic conflicts started to occur all over the SFRY. The proclamation of independence of the Serbian minority in Croatian Krajina in February and the incident in Plitvice in March were followed by the Slovenian refusal to send its soldiers to the Yugoslav Army. These events were a forecast of the armed conflict that started with the short intervention by the Yugoslav People’s Army (YPA) in Slovenia in late June of the same year and the following long years of war in Croatia (1991–95), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–95), Kosovo (1998–99) and the events in Serbia in 1999. This tragic final phase of the history of the SFRY ended with the Dayton Agreement in 1995 and the UN peacekeeping mission in Kosovo after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention in 1999. The former state dismembered to form seven new political entities: Slovenia (1991), Croatia (1991), Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1994), Macedonia (1991), Serbia (2006), Montenegro (2006) and Kosovo (2008).4
Genealogies of philosophy in the former Yugoslavia
The political changes during these turbulent years also, unsurprisingly, had a huge impact on the academic institutions and theoretical production. From the first years after the establishment of the Ljubljana University in 1919, philosophy was taught at the Faculty of Arts and this remained the only faculty in Slovenia where it was possible to study philosophy until the establishment of other Slovenian faculties for humanities at the end of the century. The end of World War II and the establishment of the SFRY brought radical changes to the Department of Philosophy, which at the time only consisted of two professors and one teaching assistant. The curriculum included the history of philosophy from ancient Greece to the early modern authors, Slovenian philosophy and noetics (epistemology). Interestingly, it was not until 2 years later, in autumn 1947, that Marxist topics entered the curriculum and were taught by young Cene Logar. After the subsequent imprisonment of Logar during the informbiro period, Marxist topics were condensed to form a single course of dialectical materialism and they stayed this way until the early 1950s. During this period, the curriculum thus consisted of the history of philosophy and dialectical materialism, and had not changed much until the mid-1950s when the philosophy department had transformed into the Department for Philosophy and Sociology and some philosophical courses had to give way to sociological ones. The latter also doubled for the courses in Marxism, while explicit dialectical materialism disappeared from the curriculum. This third period ended with the separation of the two departments, which deprived the philosophy department of one of its teachers. This was followed by a period of even greater difficulty for the philosophy department. In 1959/1960, two of its assistants, Taras Kermauner and Veljko Rus, were sanctioned for having participated in the publication of Revija 57 (Journal 57). The journal was confiscated and subsequently forbidden from publishing critical opinions on the official politics and culture in Slovenia and Yugoslavia. Having thereby lost two teachers, and having two more retire in protest at the events, in 1960 the philosophy department was on the verge of being closed down and its students redirected to other faculties in the SFRY. The situation finally started to turn for the better in 1962/1963, when new teachers and assistants took over the courses and the curriculum changed again. Apart from the history of philosophy and philosophical anthropology and/or epistemology, the curriculum also started to include courses in logics and neopositivism and some fairly controversial additions: courses in existentialism and the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Moreover, the curriculum also started to show the impact of the early 1960 schism that had split the Yugoslav Marxist philosophers into two groups. Namely, at the Fourth Meeting of the Yugoslav Philosophical Association in Bled (Slovenia), the orthodox, dogmatic interpretation of Marxism was confronted with the opinions of the younger generation of Marxists who advocated for the interpretation of Marx through his earlier works, the concepts of alienation and of praxis being thus closer to the ideas of the Frankfurt school. This second group then formed Praxis, an association and a journal that was also important for having organized the Korčula Summer School (1963–74). Although the teachers from the Ljubljana Department of Philosophy ended up supporting the ‘dogmatic’ side of the debate in Bled, the curricular changes still reflected the change of climate in Yugoslav Marxist theory. The dogmatic course of dialectical materialism was replaced by courses in Marxism, Marx’s critique of Hegel, the imperative of changing the world in Marx’s philosophy etc.
This complex philosophical (but also political) issue of the relation between so-called ‘dogmatic’ and ‘nondogmatic’ Marxism returned as a key point of contestation between Dolar, Žižek and the state authorities during the 1970s and 1980s, for example, in relation to the controversy around Žižek’s master’s thesis (Dolar et al. 2014) and the Punk Problemi affair (1981–83) (Motoh 2012). In their editorial for Problemi during the crisis with the authorities, entitled ‘Punk is a Symptom’ (Žižek 1981; Motoh 2012), Dolar and Žižek had actually foregrounded this precise distinction between ‘dogmatic’ and ‘nondogmatic’ Marxism in relation to their more affirmative interpretation of the punk movement. This ‘nondogmatic’ approach to Marxism had also been a perspective which called for a more Lacanian orientation in Marxist analyses, what might be termed Lacanian–Marxism (Žižek 2010; Laclau 1989; Žižek 1989), whereas the ‘dogmatic’ Marxism (of the state and ‘Party’) saw the Lacanian method (and French structuralism, more generally) as dangerously heterodox.
In the mid-1960s, Vojan Rus from the Belgrade Institute for the Research of the Workers’ Movement came to join the faculty and his tenure also enabled other members to obtain their PhDs and become university teachers. He introduced courses in general dialectics, ontology, gnoseology, anthropology etc., while other new members of the faculty also revived the old courses (e.g. the history of philosophy) and started new ones (e.g., philosophy of the twentieth century and ethics). It was during this period that Slavoj Žižek enrolled in the Faculty of Arts and started his studies. During his pregraduate years, other new courses were also introduced to the philosophy curriculum, most importantly, courses on Husserlian phenomenology and German idealism. Exceptionally, in 1969/1970 a course on structuralism was taught by Boris Majer, but it wasn’t repeated until 1975/1976, and this is especially important for our purposes in the light of the very significant influence of ‘French structuralism’ in the early self-identification of the Ljubljana school (Dolar et al. 2014). In the mid-1970s, the reform of the Yugoslav economy, the ‘associated labour system’, reached the universities and the departments were renamed ‘Pedagogical and Research Units’.
Throughout the 1970s, when Žižek was already a postgraduate and Dolar was doing his pregraduate studies, the curricular changes remained small and subtle. Marxist topics were mostly limited to one or two courses of ‘The Introduction to Marxology’, courses in early modern philosophy began to be consistently taught almost every year, courses in logics, methodology and positivism were expanding and so were the courses on the philosophy of the twentieth century, sometimes also with additional seminars on chosen topics, for example, on Gramsci and Althusser in 1971/1972 and on Deleuze in 1976/1977. In the late 1970s, Heidegger’s work also entered the curriculum explicitly, being first taught in relation to Kant’s aesthetics in 1978/1979. All through the 1970s and 1980s, new teachers were joining the faculty but the curriculum remained largely the same, although – interestingly enough – the number of Marxist courses started to rise again steadily through the 1980s. In the mid-1980s, first Dolar and then Žižek started to teach at the department,5 Dolar as an assistant to the lectures of Božidar Debenjak on Marxist topics and German idealism and Žižek (who had already defended his PhD) at the lectures of early modern philosophy. In addition to the university, many other research institutions also gave jobs to philosophers, sociologists, politologists and the like, the most notable of these being the Marxist centres,6 institutes of the university and institutes at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA). In 1979, the Marxist Institute was founded at the SASA, later (1988) to be renamed the Institute of Philosophy at the Scientific Research Centre of SASA. It gradually became one of the most important institutions for the development of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis (with Žižek and Zupančič particularly being associated with it) (Kalan 2009a, 2009b).
As is evident from this overview, although academic life, especially at the philosophy department (although the same held true for most of the humanities) was under the direct impact of the current politics and the shifts in official ideology in the former Yugoslavia, at the same time it also represented a determined struggle to distance academia from these currents. The purges after the war and during the informbiro period and the dismissal of teaching assistants during the Journal 57 affair in 1959/1960, were juxtaposed by a surprisingly liberal choice of course topics: existentialism in the early 1960s, Husserl in the late 1960s, structuralism in the mid-1970s and Heidegger in the 1980s. It was also crucial that the academic staff that carried out the teaching and research at the philosophy department was at the same time active in translation and journalism and also intertwined with the newly emerging literary, artistic and civil society movements. Whereas the translations were significant from an intra-philosophical perspective (engendering a constant dialogue in Slovenia with contemporary thinking abroad), the journals are especially important in relation to the key connections between the ‘young intellectuals’ and the successive ‘alternative culture’ in Slovenia (Močnik 1993), which can be seen in three important phases: punk, FV and the NSK (Motoh 2012).
‘I Walked our Land and Got an Ulcer’
In post-war Slovenia, the main open public space for the introduction of new ideas and trends was literary journals. Allegedly focused on literature – or even on youth writing only – these journals soon started to include a more varied selection of genres and topics and reached a much wider readership. One of the first journals of such importance was Beseda (Word) that was published from 1951 till 1957, when it was suppressed and forbidden. The same group of critical authors started publishing a new journal later the same year, called Revija 57 (Journal 57), only to be forbidden a year later, because of the publication of critical theoretical texts by Jože Pučnik. The third in the series of critical journals, Perspektive (Perspectives), was first published in 1960, bringing together authors from the two previous journals. Famously, the combination of political critique and contemporary literature managed to endure for 4 years – when it was forbidden – because of the intended publication of some critical texts on the conditions of the Slovenian peasantry and some literary pieces that crossed the line of tolerated criticism, for example, the poem that contained the line ‘socialism à la Louis XIV’.7 When Perspektive was suppressed, another journal that had previously stayed mostly within the confines of allowed literary production, Problemi (Problems), welcomed the group of writers from Perspektive. Around 1968, this group – along with a few critical authors from the younger generation – took over the editorial board of Problemi and transformed it into the most important journal of its time, introducing avant-garde literature trends (reism, ludism) and establishing links with contemporary artists. Two of the most notable early cooperations of this kind were the late 1960s’ publication of OHO-Katalog movement’s edition of Problemi and the early 1980s’ publication of three ‘punk’ issues of the journal (Punk Problemi), where the newly emerging music, art and social movement was given a platform to present its ideas, while being criticized by the mainstream official media (Žižek 1981; Motoh 2012). They also included presentations of other new art groups (i.e., theatre Group 442/443 and their Pupilija Ferkeverk projects) and a special issue presenting the NSK in 1985. In the mid-1970s, the editorial team started to diverge, a trend that became evident during the 1974 polemic between Ivo Urbančič, a thinker of Heideggerian provenance, and Žižek, who at the time had already distanced himself from Heideggerianism and started his work in a Lacanian direction. The loosely defined Heideggerian group left the journal in the early 1980s to establish Nova revija (The New Journal), while Problemi was progressively shifting towards structuralism and – later – a specifically Lacanian orientation (Dolar et al. 2014). Especially during the 1970s, the membership of the editorial boards of the few critical journals greatly overlapped, of which Žižek’s and Dolar’s participation in that decade are very good examples. They both participated in the publication of Problemi, Žižek since the late 1960s, Dolar since the mid-1970s; they were active in the publication of the Ljubljana students’ journal Tribuna; they joined the newly established journal Časopis za kritiko znanosti, domišljijo in novo antropologijo (Journal for the Critique of Science, Imagination and the New Anthropology) in the mid-1970s; and they published their articles in many other journals. The Institute of Marxist studies/Institute of Philosophy at the Scientific Research Centre of SASA also published a journal, called Vestnik (later Filozofski Vestnik), in which Zupančič and other authors, who were associated with the Ljubljana school (Riha et al.) were very active as well. While it is often thought that the 1989 publication of The Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek 1989) represents the virgin moment of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, we see here that the translation into English, at this time, of their work was already somewhat of a late development, with a significant pre-history (Dolar et al. 2014; Žižek et al. 2014).
In the late 1970s, after the divergence from the Heideggerian group, Problemi became the key journal for the new structuralist and Lacanian tendencies. They published translations and articles by a wide group of authors, which gradually started to differ in their interpretations of these new trends. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s, however, that the Lacanian group started to publish their work in a separate yearly journal, called Razpol, with the subtitle The Journal of the Freudian Field. The first editions, published from 1985 on, gathered a wide group of authors but were already edited by what was later to be considered a part of the core group of Lacanian authors: Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, Rado Riha and Miran Božovič. Apart from these four editors, the journal regularly published articles by Jelica Šumič-Riha, Eva Bahovec, Renata Salecl, Alenka Zupančič, Marcel Štefančič, Stojan Pelko and Zdenko Vrdlovec. The whole list of authors who published in the Razpol issues before 1991 is much longer, but the number and array of authors rapidly decreased in the process of shaping the core group within the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. A diverse group of authors focused on a very varied range of topics and decades later they ended up pursuing very different careers. Apart from Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič, some of the Razpol’s authors stayed in the academy, while others continued their work in other spheres.
It was around these journals that the new generations of thinkers gathered and introduced ideas of existentialism, critical theory, structuralism, psychoanalysis and many other new philosophical and cultural trends. It was the publication of these ideas that provided a public space, where almost complete freedom of expression was sporadically allowed, although on occasions severely supervised and criticized by the regime. The relationship that the journals had with the official line after the persecution of Perspektive was very complex, but mostly they managed to keep a fine balance, being sometimes sharply critical, but still avoiding direct persecution or prohibition. This strategy did not, however, always succeed, and the official structures used many different tactics to obstruct their work. Problemi and Tribuna were repeatedly criticized for engaging with the new critical movements. Tribuna was targeted after the student demonstrations in 1971, when one of its authors, Frane Adam, was accused of having displayed an anti-regime slogan. Subsequently, the publication of the journal was obstructed for a few months.8 In the early 1980s, Problemi and its editor Mladen Dolar were accused of having supported the alleged Nazi-punk movement by publishing Punk Problemi (Dolar et al. 2014). We will return to the question of this specific situation later, in the discussion of Dolar’s philosophy.
The publication of these critical journals was also of great importance because they regularly included translations of foreign authors, often long before they were published in book format. The first wave of such translations was done in the 1960s with the translations of the still partly controversial existentialist authors, Sartre and Camus. The most important wave of translations, however, followed from 1970 onwards. That year alone brought the translations of texts by Horkheimer, Marcuse, Althusser, Husserl, Heidegger, Saussure, Derrida, Orwell’s Animal Farm and also the first post-World War II translation of Nietzsche (Birth of Tragedy).9 Even before these texts were translated into Slovenian, some of them were available in other Yugoslav languages, notably in Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian editions. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, these translations were followed by those of Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Adorno, Gramsci and Balibar and by a whole range of translations of Freud, Lacan and Alain-Miller.
‘Gentlemen comrades, I don’t believe you’10
The journals also provided a link that proved crucial for the development of critical thought from its beginnings in the 1950s to the development of structuralist, post-structuralist and Lacanian theories, namely, a link between theory and literature/arts. The critical journals of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s all began as literary journals and then opened to topics of literary theory and criticism, philosophy, art theory and, finally, socio-political discussions. More importantly, the same authors were often active in many of these genres.
The Problemi group stayed true to the paradigm of cultural involvement of their predecessors, but took it even further. It was not only literature that they included, but they also connected with the new developments within the art scene, the first example of which was the cooperation with the OHO group in the 1960s. In very broad terms, in the history of Slovenian art, the OHO group marks the shift from modernism to avant-garde, the same change being represented in the differences between the journals Perspektive and Problemi. Žižek also contributed his texts to these publications.
These journals and their editorial boards were also active in the next great wave of alternative culture movements of the early 1980s, which can be schematically divided into three interconnected trends: the punk movement, FV 112/15 and Laibach/NSK (Motoh 2012). All happening at the same time, in the early 1980s, these three trends were not only a sharp break with the avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s, but also a unique reflection of the contemporary Yugoslav political, economic and social crisis. In the second half of the 1970s, as a reflection of the current political and economic issues and only a few years after the first British punk bands, a group of youngsters gathered to form the first Slovenian punk band, Pankrti (Bastards). Provoked by openly critical songs such as Comrades, I don’t believe you or Total revolution (. . . is not a solution) and by the provocative behaviour of young punkers, the state organs started to repress, censor and persecute the protagonists of the movement. This repression reached its peak in 1981 with the ‘Nazi-punk affair’, when a group of youngsters were arrested under fabricated charges of having established a national socialist party, and many more were questioned and harassed. Nevertheless, in the few years following Pankrti’s first concert in 1977, many new groups sprung up and, by the early 1980s, the punk movement was widespread in Ljubljana and other cities. In the same year, the new movement was given space to present themselves in the journal Problemi, in the aforementioned special edition called Punk Problemi (Dolar 1982; Žižek 1981; Motoh 2012). The second of the three special editions, issued in 1982, caused great upheaval, when the editors of the issue refused to quietly censor parts of the lyrics that were printed in the journal, but instead published pages with black spots marking the censored parts. This was simply too provocative for the official line, and Dolar, the editor of Problemi at the time, was accused of having allowed the publication of pornographic material, and forced to pay a fine (Dolar et al. 2014). Judged as an anticultural phenomenon by the right-wing opposition and as a fascist and destructionist tendency by the left-wing pro-regime literati, the punk movement functioned as a more radical version of the newly emerging social movements that sought reforms and change with their pacifist, ecological, feminist and other programmes (Močnik 1993).
While the punk movement consisted mostly of very young people, another related art and cultural movement, represented mostly by students, appeared at the same time. Group FV 112/15 started off as an alternative theatre and allegedly got their enigmatic name by randomly choosing among slogans from the dictionary of loan words (known by the name of its author as ‘France Verbinc’) and ending up with ‘c’est la guerre’, printed in France Verbinc (thus ‘FV’) on page 112, line 15. Soon, this group – Neven Korda, Zemira Alajbegović, Marina Gržinić, Dušan Mandič, Aldo Ivančić, Dario Sereval et al. – managed to take over a students’ disco club in Ljubljana for one night per week. On Tuesdays, and gradually on all other days as well, they replaced rock music of the 1960s and 1970s with the current trends in punk and new wave. Mixing music with video production, this club became the hub of the new alternative production and an instant hit among the young alternative crowd in Ljubljana and remained an important platform for new art and culture, although it frequently came under official pressure and was forced to move locations. Different alternative movements started to appear in connection with FV 112/15, most notably the movement against the discrimination of homosexuals, a unique phenomenon in Yugoslavia and the communist part of Europe at the time. Apart from special gay/lesbian nights in Disco FV, they also organized Magnus, a festival of gay and lesbian film in 1984. At the time, homosexual sex was still illegal in some parts of Yugoslavia and taboo in others. Disco FV and its activities also provided a space for the development of new art genres, specific for this generation of artists: they introduced video art and graffiti art, while also exploring the relation between art and pornography and introducing pornographic material into art forms. Some members of the FV group also formed an alternative music band, Borghesia that defined itself as a multimedia project, combining music with video art, using new tools such as video home systems (VHS) and computers. It was, however, video art that determined most of the activities of this generation of artists. Other genres included Xerox collage and graffiti, both frequently subversive in their form and content.
The third movement that shocked Slovenia and Yugoslavia at the time was the new music group Laibach, started in 1980 (Monroe 2005). Later, it joined its affiliated groups, the painters’ collective IRWIN, the group of designers Neue Kunsthandlung/Novi kolektivizem and the Sisters Scipion Nasice Theatre to form the NSK in 1984 (Monroe 2005). If FV was subversive for its popularity, choice of video genre, use of pornography and its affiliation with the gay movement, and punk was subversive for its youth rebellion, Laibach and later the whole NSK were considered the most dangerous because of their deliberate use of Nazi symbolism, an act that went against the total prohibition of Nazi symbols in post-war Yugoslavia. The name Laibach was already indicative, for they had chosen the name that was used for Ljubljana during its occupation by the Germans in World War II. Questioning the interlacing of art and ideology, they played with the old symbols in completely new contexts, thus inventing the alleged new art movement, called retrogardism. We will see below how this approach to Slovenian art, just as with the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, broadly follows a Lacanian orientation (Močnik 1993).
Their first performances, using forbidden symbols, German phrases, army smoke bombs (in Belgrade in 1982) and other provocations, provocatively caused criticism among the state organs and resulted in a series of measures being taken against the Laibach activities, most notably from early 1983 onwards. The City committee of the Socialist Union of Working People of Ljubljana demanded that Laibach should obtain permission from the city of Ljubljana to use its German name, which de facto meant that Laibach was officially forbidden to perform in public. The same year, marked by a deliberately arrogant television interview that caused another wave of criticism, also saw the beginning of two affiliated artist groups, designers’ Neue Kunsthandlung (also known as Novi kolektivizem [New collectivism]) and a theatre group Gledališče sester Scipion Nasice (Scipion Nasice Sisters’ Theatre). In 1984, all these joined to form a collective and gave it a provocatively German name Neue Slowenische Kunst (Monroe 2005). The Scipion Nasice Sisters’ Theatre, which borrowed the name from the Roman consul who had allegedly abolished theatre, also planned for its own dissolution 4 years later, and had in the meantime staged four major ‘retrograde’ theatre events. The first two, Hinkemann (1984) and Marija Nablocka (1985), staged in private apartments in Ljubljana, were followed by Krst pod Triglavom (1986) and the last one, Day of Youth in 1987, which was a reference to the widely criticized official celebrations of Tito’s birthday. All through the early 1980s, following Tito’s death and the overblown official mourning, young intellectuals, particularly in Slovenia, started to question the meaning of perpetuating the annual Day of Youth celebration that consisted of a rally of youth, a ceremony of a torch being carried all over Yugoslavia, and a final colossal celebration in a stadium in Belgrade. In 1987, during a wide debate on the proposals for the abolishment of the Relay of Youth ceremonies, another scandal broke out in connection with the NSK collective. Its designers’ subgroup, Neue Kunsthandlung/Novi kolektivizem, participated in a competition for the poster for the 1987 Relay of Youth and won with a poster that was actually a remade version of a Nazi propaganda poster by Richard Klein. The initial enthusiasm of the selecting commission was overshadowed when the reference was revealed by an unknown Serbian engineer, and the group, together with the Slovenian Youth organization leaders that initially chose the poster, became targets of a widespread attack against ‘fascist elements’, a sort of repetition of the Nazi-punk affair and the initial criticisms of Laibach in the early 1980s.
Conclusion
The story of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia is a story that is only told here through a very selective and narrow lens, with the particular focus on the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis and their connection to the specific alternative culture in Slovenia, from the punk movement through to the NSK (Motoh 2012; Monroe 2005). Tracing some of the key political factors which eventually led to the independence of each of the former federal republics of Yugoslavia, we have seen how these were accompanied by acute cultural and philosophical developments and here our focus has been mainly on the interpretation of the ‘Slovenian Lacan’. Following Rastko Močnik’s (1993) analysis, it is clear that this Lacanianism emerges as the distinctive feature of the political–intellectual landscape in Slovenia, and is accompanied by the unusual relationship between alternative culture and civil society, as well as the almost unique relationship between a generation of young intellectuals and the alternative cultures, whether of punk, FV or the NSK.
Močnik’s meta-level analysis of the relation between theory and politics is crucial here. We should note Močnik’s own seminal role in the developments in Ljubljana, being originally the very last co-editor with the poet Tomaž Šalamun (author of the infamous counter-cultural poem Duma) of the journal Perspektive before it was shut down by the Communist regime. After doing a PhD in Paris, Močnik returned to Ljubljana, becoming editor of the journal Problemi and working closely with both Dolar and Žižek, to whom he remains a close collaborator. Močnik’s text in this context, entitled ‘How we were fighting for the victory of reason and what happened when we made it’ (Močnik 1993) is very instructive in this regard, again pointing to the specificity and peculiarity of some of the Slovenian responses to the problematic, very much focusing, at a certain point, on the Lacanian philosophy as crucial to their purposes. As Močnik observes, ‘the theoretical history of the last two decades can be represented by a series of dichotomies (represented by their main authors) that led to a dead-end, and the dead-end was again broken by the discontinuous intervention of a subversive text’ (Močnik 1993: 89). What is interesting especially about this perspective is the way that it foregrounds the theoretical history as so key, a thematic we also see in Gantar (1993), Motoh (2012) and Mastnak (1988). In the Introduction, we asked what seemed to us a decisive question in this intellectual history: ‘Why Lacan?’. Here, with regard to the intra-theoretical conflicts within the original take-up of French structuralism in Ljubljana, which Dolar will refer to in detail in his interview (Dolar et al. 2014), Močnik argues as follows: ‘For instance, Derrida falls short of his critique of Husserl; he is unable to valorise the formalistic dimensions of phenomenology; in this way his anti-metaphysical verve makes him overlook the very nonmetaphysical moments in Husserl. Derrida fell victim to his own activism, we could call it “theoretical leftism”’ (Močnik 1993: 89). This rather peculiar take on Derrida is somewhat shared by the troika of thinkers, Dolar, Žižek and Zupančič. They see something different in Lacan, something unique, which is where the affirmation of an ‘orthodox Lacanianism’ (so strange to non-Lacanians) becomes clearer and somewhat more understandable. What is key here is also the manner in which Derrida’s work (and the wider movement of French structuralism), both philosophically and politically, is seen as leading to a ‘dead end’ (Močnik 1993: 85). In contrast, Lacan and Lacanianism are seen as leading beyond this impasse and paralysis. Močnik’s description here is paradigmatic to understanding the move made by Žižek and Dolar in the 1970s towards Lacan, but it also shows how this Lacanian movement was more generalized in the alternative theoretical circles in Slovenia: ‘the intervention of Lacan was decisive; it enabled us to reformulate in a theoretically productive way the seeming dead-ends of the previous theories. Against the dead-end formulas, I put first the Lacanian concepts that break the dead-end, and then the positive reformulation of the impasse’ (Močnik 1993: 88). This is brilliantly and decisively expressed here; breaking through the dead ends and reformulating the impasse; and this was only possible through Lacanianism. Significantly, Močnik opposed the dissolution of Yugoslavia and independence for Slovenia and the other federal republics in 1991, but precisely on Lacanian grounds.
But how did this Lacanian intervention, so radically and persuasively articulated here, work in the longer term? As Gantar has powerfully shown, the complex relation between civil society and alternative culture was to have an influence even beyond independence. For Gantar, going all the way back to the late 1960s’ eruption of dissent (and even through the political journals of the 1950s and 1960s), there was a sense of a ‘legitimate’ space for criticism of state socialism. This ‘liberalizing’ tolerance towards dissent was meant to be a sign of the greater political freedoms available under the Yugoslav regime of Tito (e.g., as compared to the Soviet bloc). There was, of course, a partial truth to this liberalization; as Dolar puts it in his later essay on punk and civil society (Dolar 2003), ‘we cannot pretend we were Czechoslovakia’. The 1968 and 1971 university struggles were examples of this relatively liberal tolerance in Ljubljana (Dolar et al. 2014), as well as the ‘critique of the red bourgeoisie’ (Gantar 1993) which seems to have come from civil society movements.
However, this appearance of the liberal civil society in Yugoslavia also masked what Gantar (1993) refers to as the attempted ‘colonisation of the life world’. In other words, even the possibility or conditions of dissent were kept under strict regime control and ‘civil society’ became the receptacle for such forms of resistance which could then be effectively ‘colonised’ by the state. Gantar, for example, in his ‘Discussions on Civil Society in Slovenia’ speaks of the political colonization of the life world in Yugoslavia, which ‘effectively obliterated civil society’ (Gantar 1993: 358). According to Gantar, ‘they [the regime] were not satisfied with economic and political subordination of the population but set about cultural subordination and the capturing of souls, bedrooms and social life as their next goal’ (Gantar 1993: 357). In such a context, the new forms of social movement or alternative culture ‘actually signified a new form of society, not infected by official ideology and politics’ (Gantar 1993: 357).
This interpretation (important in understanding the pre- and post-independence contexts) is articulated by Gantar, Močnik and also by others such as Mastnak (1988) in his theory of ‘social implosion’ and Zgaga (1991) in his critique of ‘politics as domination’ under so-called democracy. Each of these readings, in different ways, foregrounds both the importance of the space of a genuinely ‘alternative culture’ not reducible to civil society (Motoh 2012), while also calling attention to some of the limitations of the ‘national independence movements’, which in the case of Slovenia, were to lead to official nationhood in 1991. In the measure to which these movements, which explicitly sought independence and foregrounded the ‘nation’, stemmed more from civil society than from the alternative culture (the latter, for example, the NSK [Monroe 2005], being famously more ambivalent on the values of socialism and/or nationalism), we can perhaps foresee some of the political, cultural and philosophical issues which would remain after the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. In the conclusion to his important essay, Gantar (who was to go on to have an important role in independent Slovenia as a politician) also looks at the more long-term picture of the relation between state, civil society and the other space inhabited by some aspects of the counter-culture, reflecting on the processes after 1991 independence: ‘civil society has not disappeared since independence but come more to the fore . . . we can say that there are dangerous pitfalls when civil society initiatives “unmediated” become the ruling idea in politics’ (Gantar 1993: 365).
Tomaž Mastnak, in his influential essay, ‘The implosion of the social’ (Mastnak 1988) connects this thematic of the limits of civil society in the former Yugoslavia to the question of the whole construct of ‘Eastern Europe’ as it is viewed by Western intellectuals, right or left. This thematic of ‘Eastern Europe’ is, of course, also key for the NSK, and especially in the cases of Laibach and IRWIN (Monroe 2005). ‘My question is how does Eastern Europe function in a particular Western European discourse? What kind of constellation produces such functioning and what are the theoretical implications [which] such functioning of Eastern Europe has?’ (Mastnak 1988: 113). Mastnak thematizes again some of the distinctions made between alternative culture and civil society, here offering some criticism of what he sees as the avant-garde opposition for opposition’s sake. As Mastnak notes, ‘what must become fundamental for us is initiation, not dissidence; that is, we should consider ourselves first and foremost as initiators of future possibilities and not as subversives; dropouts, rebels who are anti-a, anti-b and anti-c’ (Mastnak 1988: 124). Again, in a manner related to the criticism of the ‘colonisation of the life-world’ (Gantar 1993) in the former Yugoslavia, including its supposed spaces of resistance and system critique, which Gantar, among others, has put forward, Mastnak seems to be looking for other alternatives here: ‘We should leave resistance and repression to the ruling powers and transform our opposition into an increasingly clear position’ (Mastnak 1988: 124). Strikingly, it is the Lacanian philosophy which provides this Slovenian political intellectual with his framework for transformation. Mastnak here is more vehement than the other critics cited in his critique of ‘socialism’ as such, but he shares the Lacanian perspective: ‘In order to escape the split in the Real, we struggle in reality. . . . Socialism is an almost perfect example of a political project or system which cannot face its own limitations and incapacity . . . and which almost pathetically takes refuge in struggles in reality; a symptom of this pathology is the continual invention of internal and external enemies; enemies are the only true love of socialism’ (Mastnak 1988: 124). There is a great irony here if we think back to the previous attempts by the state to interpret alternative culture, whether punk, FV or the NSK, as a ‘symptom’ of ‘fascism’. Now the symptom critique is turned back against the system itself.
Of course, as we have seen, this critique and wariness of the ‘official’ civil society (under state socialism) was the very driving force of the Slovenian alternative culture from the beginning. As Dolar observes about the NSK, and he might equally have said this of punk, ‘the NSK equally scoffs at socialism and the dissenters’ (Dolar 2003). Crucially for our purposes, Dolar might equally have said this of the political–philosophical perspective of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. As we will see in the following chapters, which focus on interviews and critical analysis with Dolar, Žižek and Zupančič, each of these thinkers in their own way is alert to the simultaneous limitations of state socialism and contemporary, supposedly ‘democratic’, global capitalism. For each of the thinkers, Lacanianism provides the privileged philosophical perspective to deconstruct the ‘short circuiting’ (Žižek 2005) of the system, what Močnik has spoken of more generally as the ‘breakthrough’ of Lacan, working through the ‘impasse’ of French structuralism (Močnik 1993). For the respective thinkers, different concepts become foregrounded: for Dolar, cogito and voice; for Žižek, ideology; and for Zupančič, ethics and comedy. But each of these individual intellectual journeys testifies to the fecundity of psychoanalysis as a philosophical and a political-cultural framework for understanding both our contemporary malaise and how we have come to be in such a malaise. Here, we can see the problematics of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis come full circle from the work and the crises with the alternative culture in the 1970s and 1980s. We can relate this problematic back to the ‘Nazi scandal’ of the Punk Problemi issues we discussed above, for which Dolar as editor was charged with publishing pornography and supporting Nazi or ‘fascist propaganda’ (Motoh 2012). This attempt by the state to ‘stigmatise’ the punk movement with the accusation of fascism would eventually fail. As Gantar notes, ‘the attempt to stigmatise punk with fascism was never successful, even though Igor Vidnana was imprisoned for 30 days’ (Gantar 1993: 362). With reference to the role of Dolar (who had to appear and speak in court) and Žižek, among others, Gantar clarifies that ‘the reason for the failure was a specific liaison between the punk alternative scene and the younger intellectuals’ (Gantar 1993: 361–2).
In a philosophical text on fascism published during this period, Dolar notes strikingly that the historical heritage of fascism is preserved ‘not in those movements or regimes that seem most similar by their appearance, but lives on in late capitalism as such’ (Dolar 1982: 31; Motoh 2012). The key question, according to the author, is thus: ‘how does fascism continue today with different means?’ (Dolar 1982: 31). And if we can say that fascism is a metaphor for capitalist society, what metaphor is socialism reflected in? (Motoh 2012: 292). We could argue that these remain the key questions today for the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, both as political questions and as questions with regard to the psychic register of the enigmatic subject.