CHAPTER THREE

From punk to cogito to voice: On Mladen Dolar

Introduction – Dolar’s philosophical evolution

Although it is Slavoj Žižek’s work in philosophy which has received the most attention internationally (Kay 2003), the genealogy of his Lacanian approach cannot be separated from the seminal figure of Mladen Dolar. Indeed, Žižek has constantly been the first to acknowledge Dolar’s influence (Žižek et al. 2014). In our interview with Dolar et al. (2014), what becomes clear are the powerful ties of culture and friendship which bind the latter and Žižek, from the late 1960s onwards. As Dolar et al. (2014) observes, ‘’71 was our ’68’. Developing their work from this period onwards, one also sees significant philosophical commonalities, their both being influenced powerfully by the wider movement of French structuralism, a ‘unity in difference’ in the early 1970s, from Derrida to their fellow Eastern European, Kristeva. Their going to Paris, for example, in the late 1970s, their taking on a certain ‘ultraorthodox’ perspective in Lacanianism, the evolution of their work simultaneously in the local environs of Ljubljana and internationally. Finally, we see this philosophical and psychoanalytical duo develop into a troika with the emergence of Alenka Zupančič as a thinker in her own right, having been a gifted student of both Dolar and Žižek (Zupančič et al. 2014; Žižek et al. 2014).

Dolar’s philosophical evolution, as we will see him describe it in the interview below, begins with the advent of a French structuralist influence, understood in a broad sense, through the 1970s to a more specific Lacanian orientation. In the 1980s, Dolar’s editorial work with Problemi (through some of its most acute controversies) is noteworthy, foregrounding his important interpretations of the concept of fascism (Dolar 1982). This latter work is best understood as the beginning of the more advanced political critique of state socialism in the former Yugoslavia, which will find an international audience in Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology in 1989. Dolar continues this political critique in his significant monograph A Voice and Nothing More (Dolar 2006), which reads the advent of Milošević, in the former Yugoslavia, in relation to a whole psychoanalytics of inauthentic ‘voice’. Here, he focuses on the employment of the enigma of the ‘voice’ by Milošević at political rallies in Serbia early in the conflict (Dolar 2006: 189).

Thus, we can read Dolar’s work here alongside that of the work of Slovenian commentators such as Močnik (1993), Mastnak (1988) and Gantar (1993), as was discussed in Chapter 1, although Dolar’s work remains perhaps less politically compromised than any of the latters’ work. Here, his reading of Marx and the subtle reinterpretation of Marxist concepts such as ideology, the symptom and materialism in his work are crucial to his original contribution (Marx 1992a, 1992b; Balibar 2007). Dolar’s work on the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) and Laibach also brings out this crucial reinterpretation of ideology (Dolar 1989, 2003, 2006).

His work since the 1980s has seen a growing conceptual sophistication and development, with strong affinities to the work of Žižek, while remaining distinctive in its own specific philosophical concerns. In terms of the Lacanian perspective, it is perhaps Lacan’s (1994) Seminar XI on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis which is most evident in Dolar’s reading, with special emphasis on the ‘object voice’ and the concept of the ‘drive’ (Dolar 2006). Dolar’s work brings out the properly surrealist constitution of the drive, a connotation which Lacan constantly plays with in Seminar XI. One striking example of this more surrealist reading in Dolar’s work is the employment of Kafka and what Dolar refers to as ‘Kafka’s Voices’ (Dolar 2006) to explore the sheer absurdity of the drive, which nonetheless somehow ends up as a justification for psychoanalysis as a ‘science of freedom’ (Dolar 2006), albeit the only freedom available to us, a ‘wretched freedom’.

Here, we can reinvoke Benjamin’s understanding of freedom as it is articulated through surrealism (Kafka being another in a long line of dissident surrealists). Benjamin says: ‘Since Bakunin, Europe has lacked a radical concept of freedom. The Surrealists have one’ (Benjamin 1979: 236). And in a key which anticipates Dolar’s analysis to come: ‘They are the first to liquidate the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom, because they are convinced that “freedom, which on this earth can only be bought with a thousand of the hardest sacrifices, must be enjoyed unrestrictedly in its fullness without any kind of pragmatic calculation, as long as it lasts”’ (Benjamin 1979: 236).¹

If there is a key Freudian text for Dolar, it is perhaps Civilisation and Its Discontents (Freud 2002a), with the emphasis on thanatology and an overarching ‘death drive’, a surging Thanatos having the upper hand on a defeatist Eros. Here, Dolar’s work would seem to be in line only with the most radical of neo-Freudians, such as Leo Bersani (2002), who see this late Freudian text as apocalyptically jettisoning all anthropomorphic false hopes and cares. In Bersani’s analysis, what becomes crucial to understand is the redirection which psychoanalysis takes ‘against ego psychology’ (Bersani 2002: xxi). But this critique, sometimes associated with Lacan (as against Freud), is here reread by Bersani as precisely a ‘return to Freud’, that is, to the later Freud and Civilisation and Its Discontents (Freud 2002a): ‘Lacan’s assault on ego psychology can be best justified as a profound fidelity to psychoanalysis itself, as a recognition that a psychology of adaptation to the world is by definition a nonpsychoanalytic psychology. Psychoanalysis gives a persuasive account not of human adjustment but of that which makes us unfit for civilised life; this should at least cast some doubt on the validity of any notion of a psychoanalytic “cure”’ (Bersani 2002: xxi).

This rejection tout court of the adaptive version of psychoanalysis, whether of Freud or Lacan, links Bersani clearly to the perspective of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, and especially to Dolar (although we will see that this situation has changed somewhat). We might also cite here Zupančič’s critique of what she terms contemporary ‘bio-morality’ and the fetishization of ‘happiness’ in her book on comedy, to which we will return later (Zupančič 2008a). However, we will see that, in their most recent work, both Dolar and Zupančič complicate the binarism between ‘desire’ and ‘drive’ or ‘eros’ and ‘thanatos’, instigating more of a ‘doubling’ complicity between these binary concepts. This ‘doubling’ will also allow for a way out of the impasse of life drives versus death drives. In this breakthrough, we can also see a distancing, in their readings of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis, between Dolar and Zupančič on the one side, and Bersani on the other.

This more ‘deconstructive’ reading of psychoanalysis links Dolar among others to Derrida, whose own relations to Lacanianism are complex (Hurst 2008). We see especially a strong affinity with Derrida in A Voice and Nothing More (Dolar 2006), although there Dolar is keen to stress his differences from the reading of ‘phonocentrism’ in deconstruction. In Dolar, following the later Lacan, the ‘object voice’ would foreground what Malcom Bowie has referred to as a ‘localisation of strife’ (Bowie 1991: 28): ‘Thus is the strife of the Presocratics no longer at work ubiquitously in the cosmos but localised in the human species’ (Bowie 1991: 28). This would perhaps be the paradox of Dolar’s work, delivering a more apocalyptic (and satirical) message than either Žižek or Zupančič, while doing so with the utmost politeness and seeming goodwill (as the interview testifies). Dolar’s deep suspicion of theology in philosophy, notable in the interview, and again very much in the spirit of the late Freud, can only look rather askance at some of Žižek’s more recent theological affinities (Kotsko 2008; Žižek and Milbank 2009; Pearson 2013), and this would perhaps be a more significant philosophical difference than the interview admits. Here, Dolar and Zupančič would appear to be more congruent in a thoroughgoing psychoanalytical atheism. A paradigmatic example of this eschewal of the God-concept by Dolar is in his analysis of the ‘cogito’ in Descartes, where he views the latter as ultimately opting for a get-out clause of ‘God as big Other’ (Dolar 1998). This last move is rejected by Dolar as a residue of traditional (pre-modern) metaphysics, which awaits Kant and especially Hegel’s ultimately atheistic phenomenology to be fully exorcized.

Reading Lacan-Hegel-Marx in Dolar

Lacan’s work on the enigmatic notion of the ‘subject’ in the Écrits (Lacan 2002a) is also influential on Dolar’s extraordinary reading of the ‘cogito’ in his seminal essay ‘Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious’ (Dolar 1998), which is also noteworthy for its brilliant overall meta-reading of Lacan. In this context, Dolar concludes his essay with an exploration of the whole corpus of Lacan’s work. His analysis seems to have shown many different conceptions of the notion of ‘subject’ as it relates to other key concepts in psychoanalysis such as the ‘Real’ and this shifting ground is, Dolar admits, one of the oft-quoted reasons for Lacan’s supposed ‘difficulty’ in being read. Dolar sees this as a paradox as he describes simultaneously not only ‘the baffling differences of Lacan’s system’ but also ‘the exceptional unity’ (Dolar 1998: 37), ‘the implacable logic . . . and the stubborn search’ (Dolar 1998: 38). Again, we might see this as connected to a more traditional understanding of philosophy, going back to the Greeks, as an endless questing or in Platonic terms a ‘dialogue’ with truth or even, understood more negatively, a ‘refutation’ of truth (elenchus) (Plato 1961). We will see Dolar link the psychoanalytic quest with the Platonic once again in his book on ‘voice’, where he describes both psychoanalysis and the Socratic philosophical project as forms of ‘aprotreptic’ (Dolar 2006), that is, forms of ‘leading away from the truth’ rather than towards it. But here, his analysis is focused specifically on the Lacanian trajectory. ‘The problem with understanding Lacan stems among other things from the fact that one has to follow the logic of the development of his theory and not to take any of the stages for granted as some definitive shape of truth’ (Dolar 1998: 38). And here we get to the nub of his meta-level reading of Lacan – against all appearances to the contrary (his ‘dogmatic stance’), Lacan would in no way be a dogmatic thinker: ‘Lacan’s dogmatic stance goes hand in hand with his most undogmatic demeanour; only a dogmatist “on the level of the task” can never be afraid of putting into question the previous results, turning them upside down without mercy, if the new questions make it necessary’ (Dolar 1998; 37). Of course, in an indirect way, this is also Dolar describing his own philosophical (Lacanian) method and, by extension, the method of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis more generally.

Along with his avowed Lacanianism, there is also a markedly strong Hegelian influence in Dolar’s work throughout, which can be seen, for example, as early as his PhD work on ‘Hegel and Lacan’ (Dolar et al. 2014). Arguably, this has itself had an effect on Žižek’s more recent Hegelian emphasis (Žižek 2012a). What Dolar also demonstrates very well is the complexity of the relation between Lacan and Hegel, insofar as the former’s reading of Hegel ‘gets it significantly wrong’ (Dolar et al. 2014). This is an enigmatic scene of interpretation which, for example, Bruce Baugh’s (2005) work has helped us to understand better. Baugh provides some very helpful historical contextualization of this problematic and begins by complicating ‘the notion that Alexandre Kojève’s lectures brought Hegel to France’ (Baugh 2005: 1). This common argument with regard to Kojève (while undoubtedly an influence in view of Lacan’s faithful attendance at his seminar) nonetheless underestimates the alternative influences of surrealism, Marxism and also Jean Wahl, whose book on the ‘unhappy consciousness’ in Hegel precedes Kojève by a decade, beginning in 1929/1939. We discussed this matter in a different key in Chapter 2, in relation to Macey’s controversial reading of Lacan (Macey 1988). Dolar’s work is exemplary in the clarity of its exposition of this rather contorted and problematic scene of interpretation, which can also be seen in the light of the significant influence of surrealism on Lacan’s work, which is much in evidence (Macey 1988; Lacan 1994).

As Baugh (2005: 5) outlines, the neo-Kierkegaardian Wahl also developed early a penetrating analysis (via a negative reading of Hegel) of ‘a self divided against itself, an internally divided and self-alienated subject; a subject that strives vainly for synthesis but instead oscillates between self and non-self, being and nothingness’. We should keep this background in mind when coming to explore, through Dolar’s analysis, the relation between Hegelianism and Lacan. The influence of this vision of the ‘internally divided self’ significantly influences Lacan in his notion of the ‘subject’, although in Dolar, this notion has more Hegelian resonance. What is also striking about Dolar’s reading of Hegel is its critique of the latter’s philosophical system as some kind of ‘overarching synthesis’. The originality of the interpretation here is that it counters the accusation that somehow, for example in Derrida’s view, that ‘Hegel neglects dissymmetry’: ‘It is this dissymmetry which Hegel “misses”’; ‘poetry, laughter, ecstasy are nothing; Hegel knows no other aim than knowledge; his immense fatigue is linked to his horror of the blind spot’ (Derrida 1978: 256). For Derrida, Hegel cannot seem to philosophically register the absence of meaning or the dissymmetry of meaning. He tries to turn the blind spot into some kind of meaningful vision. For Dolar, to the contrary, the Hegelian system is on the side of ‘nonmeaning’, that which doesn’t make sense. It is in this way that Hegel anticipates the Freudian and Lacanian ‘unconscious’, which is a ‘thought which doesn’t make sense’ (Dolar 1998). Dolar’s critical comments on Lacan’s reading of Hegel also give the lie to those who would read Dolar as an ‘orthodox Lacanian’, in any sterile sense. Again, as his interview makes clear, for Dolar, orthodoxy is transformation.

Alongside Hegel, in the thinking of the troika, there is also Marx. Dolar’s interview foregrounds the difficulties and significant conflicts between competing versions of Marxism in the history of the politics of the former Yugoslavia (Dolar et al. 2014), for example in relation to Žižek’s difficulties in having his master’s thesis accepted at Ljubljana, or in the distinction between ‘dogmatic’ and ‘nondogmatic’ Marxism which Dolar and Žižek invoke with regard to the reading of ‘punk as a symptom’ (Žižek 1981; Motoh 2012). The whole reading of Marx vis-à-vis psychoanalysis is at the heart, first of the movement of Praxis in Zagreb and Belgrade and then succeeding that phase, in the disagreements between the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis and the Praxis school. But what perhaps at least the Praxis school and Dolar, Žižek and Zupančič can agree on is the contribution of Marx to philosophy, which Balibar has described as another kind of ‘Copernican revolution’ in philosophy’s self-understanding (Balibar 2007). For Balibar, while the early Marx starts out in a very philosophical mode, his mid-to-late work signifies a critique of philosophy’s self-understanding as a kind of master discipline. To invoke Frederic Jameson, Marxism is ‘unlike any other contemporary mode of thought, what I will call a unity-of-theory-and-practice’. The most obvious instance of this is in Marx’s text ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (Marx 1992a), where he outlines that, whereas previous philosophy had primarily sought to interpret the world, the point is ‘rather to change it’ (Marx 1992a: 423).

Dolar, as with both Žižek and Zupančič, thus takes a very modernist view on the nature of philosophical practice or ‘praxis’. As with Žižek, philosophy proper is seen as beginning with Kant (or Descartes) (Dolar et al. 2014) and the premodern metaphysical conceptions of philosophy, seem rather for Dolar ‘metaphoric approximations’ of philosophical conceptuality in a post-Kantian sense. In this way, psychoanalysis is inconceivable for Dolar in a pre-Cartesian world and the notion of the ‘unconscious’ itself is a significantly radicalized concept in Freud and (further again) in Lacan, and should not be misunderstood in terms of earlier models which might, on a surface level, seem compatible (e.g., we might think here of Plato’s conception of the ‘tri-partite’ psyche in The Republic or some of the conceptions of the mind in Aristotle’s De Anima). In this way, psychoanalysis represents a radical break with previous philosophical thought. But, again, as with Žižek and Zupančič, Dolar does not read this as a rupture with philosophy per se. Each of the three thinkers is unequivocal on the status of their work as philosophy (perhaps even more than as psychoanalysis). Psychoanalysis in this sense is nothing but philosophy. Indeed, the urgency of Dolar’s work stems precisely from a sense of philosophy’s age-old responsibility to speak against the ‘doxa’ of the times, and here the legacy really does go all the way back to early Greece. Despite Dolar’s emphasis on modern thought, his work is excellently grounded in the tradition of philosophy and his employment of, for example, pre-Socratic thought (in the shape of Heraclitus or Empedocles) or of Socrates or Plato is often rich in suggestion and insight.

Socrates and the daemonic voice

One significant example of this reference to the tradition of philosophy is Dolar’s in-depth discussion of Socrates and the latter’s ‘daemonic voice’ at a crucial juncture of the argument concerning the ‘object voice’ in A Voice and Nothing More (Dolar 2006). In a beautifully wild reading of Socrates (reminiscent of the brilliance of Derrida’s reading of Plato in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ [Derrida 1981] but wholly original in its own right), Dolar mesmerizes the reader into an understanding of the ‘agent voice’ as the connecting link between Plato, Lacan and the absurdity of contemporary existence (Dolar 2006). This section of the text is also noteworthy in that it thematizes what Dolar calls an ‘ethics of the voice’, foregrounding the concept of the ethics of psychoanalysis, which will become so crucial as a theme for Zupančič most especially (Zupančič 2000). But, of course, ethics as understood by psychoanalysis owes very little to traditional concepts of morality. In effect, ethics constitutes a full frontal assault on the ressentiment (Nietzsche 1967) of traditional forms of thinking, often linked together in a morality–theology matrix. As Bowie notes apropos Lacan, the superego grounds traditional morality and is an ‘infantile solution to infantile problems’ (Bowie 1991). Freud is similarly castigating concerning the ‘illusions’ of religion in, for example, Civilisation and Its Discontents, referring to religious belief as a particularly degenerate and persistent form of ‘psychic infantilism’ (Freud 2002a).

Here, Dolar follows both these examples, but paradoxically in relation to the more seemingly traditional figure of Socrates (Dolar 2006). In a powerful and original reflection on the voice and ethics, Dolar outlines how the ‘daemonic voice’ in Socrates can be seen as an ultimate authority, moreover an ‘infallible authority beyond logos’ (Dolar 2006: 85). Dolar connects this back to the very origins of philosophy itself, understood to be in the practice of Pythagoras, who spoke from behind a curtain to maintain the mystique of his philosophical voice. This original example captures, for Dolar, the paradox of the voice, simultaneously transcendent and the most intimate phenomenon, as in the case of Socrates who describes the daemonic voice as, at the same time, ‘coming from on high’ and a ‘most inner voice’ (Dolar 2006: 85). It is, Dolar says, ‘intimate and extimate’, an ‘atopical voice’ and of course, in these characteristics, the voice seems to resemble the very structure of subjectivity itself, as delineated in its very enigmatic contrariness in Seminar XI (Lacan 1994).

One might imagine, Dolar says, that such a voice would be ‘prescriptive’ but to the contrary, it tells us nothing positive. It only tells Socrates what he must not do and so in this way it is like the very method of elenchus (refutation) which Socrates uses as his paradigm of philosophical disputation, always pleading ignorance while undermining hubristic assertions of truth. Here, Dolar draws the comparison to philosophy itself, both the daemonic voice and philosophy being forms of ‘aprotreptic’ (Dolar 2006: 85), forms of leading one away from the truth and not closer to it: ‘the voice has a negative aprotreptic function’ (Dolar 2006: 85). Of course, by implication, we are also foregrounding here the analogy between psychoanalysis and philosophy. How far we are here from the assertive protreptic of, for example, ego psychology, where the answers to our problems would be clear and concise. Here, the aforementioned logic of Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents converges almost perfectly with Dolar’s Lacanian ‘object voice’. In itself, perhaps, this is surprising enough. What is perhaps more startling is the connection back to the veritable Platonic tradition of philosophy.

We will also see Plato invoked crucially by Zupančič later in our analysis when she comes to read Plato’s dialogue The Symposium (Plato 1961) as the master text of the philosophy of comedy (Zupančič 2008a). Time and again in Freud and Lacan, one reads this avowal of Plato and the Platonic tradition (alongside a simultaneous, and vehement, disavowal of Aristotelianism) (Freud 1977, 2002a; Lacan 1992; Zupančič 2008a). A final point we might note here (although Dolar’s important analysis here deserves greater time) is that the Socratic voice very much sets up ethics against legality and the ‘political law’ or in Greek terms, the polis or custom (nomos). As Dolar notes: ‘The voice pertains to the moral law and not the political laws of the community, as the voice actually dissuaded Socrates from taking part in active political life. The Kantian opposition between morality and legality; morality as a matter of the voice and legality a matter of the letter’ (Dolar 2006: 86). Here, we might see the ‘voice’ as an instrument of the ‘critique of ideology’, a critique which we have seen Dolar undertake, for example, in relation to his early defence of punk and alternative culture, an issue we will return to in the conclusion to this chapter (Dolar 1982, 2003). Of course, in the case of Žižek’s work especially, this critique of ideology (still ‘pertinent’, despite all appearances: Žižek 1994b) will take centre stage (Žižek 1989, 1992a, 2008b).

Finally, with regard to Dolar’s oeuvre, the inter-disciplinarity of his work must be mentioned. As he mentions in the interview (Dolar et al. 2014), Tel Quel was an early influence with its war cry of ‘Lautréamont and Rimbaud for the 19th century, Bataille and Artaud for the 20th century’. Dolar’s readings of literature and art (and more recently music and opera in his co-authored work with Žižek, Opera’s Second Death [Dolar and Žižek 2002]) are always subtle and immensely patient, as befits the work of the son of a great Slovenian literary critic, Jaro Dolar. But it is perhaps Dolar’s work on film, evident in all his texts, and especially his work on Hitchcock, extending in translation all the way back to the early 1990s’ collection Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (Žižek 1992b; Dolar 1992a, 1992b), which constitutes one of his most original contributions, again influencing a significant strand of recent film criticism and theory. But, as with all of Dolar’s work, his analysis of film is done less for its own sake and more as part of an overall Lacanian philosophical vision, with a strong emphasis on political intervention. It was this emphasis which, as Močnik (1993) has noted, was one of the most powerful levers in the development of a society-wide critique of the former Yugoslavia and its problematical ideologies, breaking through the impasse. What is clear there is Dolar’s leading role in what Močnik (1993) refers to as the emergent Lacanian orientation in Slovenia. It is arguable, in Slovenian philosophical circles, that Dolar may well be the more influential figure over Žižek, perhaps also insofar as his institutional role, in the philosophy department at the university, has led him to have a greater proximity to the next generation of philosophical thinkers. We can also see Dolar’s role as paradigmatic in relation to Gantar’s key analysis of the conflict between civil society and alternative culture in Slovenia (Gantar 1993; Motoh 2012). As the interview makes clear, the philosophical friendship between Dolar, Zupančič and Žižek remains as significant now as it ever was. Nonetheless, we can also point to significant differences between the approaches taken by the three thinkers in their own right.

‘From Structuralism to Lacan’ – Interview with Mladen Dolar

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Slovenia has been described (for example, by Alexei Monroe) as having a markedly problematic genealogy in terms of nationhood and cultural independence. Can you say if and how this problematical genealogy might be seen as affecting your own work and how significant it is for you that you are seen as a ‘Slovenian’ philosopher or part of a ‘Slovenian school’ of philosophy?

Mladen Dolar: This is indeed a very complex history and let me seek to delineate some of its key aspects, as they are relevant to our problematic. First, one must say that the Yugoslav political and economic system was one of self-management and non-alignment under Tito and this was of course anti-Stalinist and in opposition to the Soviet system in principle. However, whether one takes this issue in a theoretical sense of Marxism or a practical sense of policy, one can argue that there was really only lip service paid to a critique of Stalinism in Yugoslavia. That is, in reality, the theory and practice was quite similar to what it was in the Soviet bloc. This explains the emergence, for example, of the Praxis movement in opposition to the regime, which itself was a Marxist philosophy, but one more consistently guided by an anti-Soviet ‘humanism’. While this movement was mostly associated with philosophical figures in Belgrade and Zagreb, it also had a powerful influence in Slovenia and Ljubljana. In the 1970s, however, Praxis would be crushed by the authorities who saw it as a dangerous source of dissent and resistance. As an undergraduate philosophy student at Ljubljana, I can say that there was a mix of Marxism and Heidegger – they were the key early influences for me and for others, including Slavoj, who was just ahead of me in the philosophy degree at Ljubljana. However, while we can state this aspect of the Tito regime, nonetheless one should also be aware of the cosmopolitan nature of Ljubljana especially, with a mix of Germanic, Italian and Slavic influences. The partisan struggle of World War II was a key moment of identification for many, and of course, we see this recurring in some of the motifs of the work of the NSK.

The first opposition journal which was both cultural and philosophical was Perspektive, founded in 1957, influenced by existentialism and especially by Heidegger and Sartre. In 1969, Perspective was banned by the authorities and the writers joined another journal, Problemi, which had already been established. This was a key moment of struggle, the late 1960s and early 1970s which formed me – for example, I can cite the Vietnam War protests and also the evolution of more radical resistance groups. It was a time of tumult. Žižek had enrolled at university in 1967 and I enrolled in 1969. Slavoj and I first met in 1970. For us, the key moment was not 1968 but here in Ljubljana at the Faculty of Arts it was May 1971, when there was an occupation of the Faculty of Arts by protesting students, including ourselves. I became the chief editor of the student newspaper called Tribuna, and this involved a crystallizing of French structuralism and an attendant politicization of philosophy. If we want a connection between Lacan and 1968, for example, we can mention that Lacan smuggled Cohn Bendit to safety at the time. But, more importantly, structuralism can be seen as one framework in which to understand first, the May 1968 events and second, the evolution of this original moment later in Ljubljana. Of course, it was not simply a philosophical revolution. We might also mention the Vietnam protests, for example, as well as the occupation of Czechoslovakia, events which radicalized the students and the population. Another key figure here from a political perspective was Che Guevara. I might also mention that our specific situation in Slovenia meant that different and more varied influences were at work, both Austrian and Italian influences as opposed to the rest of Yugoslavia. These influences were more pronounced in Slovenia, as well as the influence of West Germany, of course. Although 1968 is often seen simply as a culturalist phenomenon, this is to miss the significant political issues of equality as well as liberty which were addressed in such a radically original way.

In Ljubljana then in May 1971, there was an occupation of the Faculty of Arts. Due to the wisdom of the Slovenian leadership at the time, and the view that strict punishment of those involved would only make matters more acute, no one was imprisoned. In May 1971, from a philosophical political perspective, we were still trying to evolve a very different kind of Marxism from the official state version. There was dramatic momentum and we looked to structuralism as a vigorous intellectual movement of unity – of course, later we would radically call into question this unity and opt instead for Lacan as the more singular figure within this movement. Later, the conflicts between different versions of structuralism became more apparent. But we should also note that we didn’t in any way see Marxism and structuralism as mutually opposed or exclusive, quite the contrary in fact. Tel Quel as a journal of the Parisian literary Left was especially important to us at this juncture, as it seemed to unify these great figures of structuralism, whether one is talking about Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Jacobson, Barthes, Kristeva, Sollers or the more generalized ferment of Maoism. Julia Kristeva was especially important to us, as due to her Bulgarian background we felt a key affinity with her. Again, we look forward here to one of the key thematics of the NSK, and especially IRWIN, their conception of the specificity of the Eastern European identity and culture, despite all the latter’s internal differentiation, from the Western bloc. Also, this will recur as a theme especially in Slavoj’s work. Translations of these French texts were also a key part of this hermeneutics; we would translate these French texts into Slovenian for the journals we were editing. For example, in 1974, I translated Kristeva for Problemi. We can note here the preponderance of this kind of intellectual culture of journals in Slovenia, something which has continued to the present. There is a terrific vibrancy within the Slovenian context in this regard, and all the while through the 1970s and 1980s, myself and Žižek were publishing essays in these journals as well as publishing books. So, again, when people say that The Sublime Object of Ideology came out of nowhere in 1989, I would say that this is a very ignorant misunderstanding of the genealogy of this strand of thinking. It significantly underestimates the pre-history of this text.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: So this is how it all got started, as it were, in Ljubljana? What seems particularly striking is first, the fusion from the beginning in Slovenia of structuralist and Marxist elements (elements kept apart elsewhere until significantly later). Second, however, how the attempted fusion of Marxism and structuralism, for example, in the work of the journal Problemi, was deemed to be heterodox and bourgeois by the state Marxist ideology. Can you say a little more about this complex of issues and how Slavoj became a paradigmatic figure in this ideological struggle with Yugoslav official policy?

Mladen Dolar: Yes, this, one can say, is how it did all get started in Ljubljana, with regard to a group of people who took up the task of intellectual revolution. The key period in this regard was 1968–72 in Yugoslavia, where there was a terrific political, cultural and philosophical moment, both in a lifestyle sense and also in a more philosophical sense. In the former case, what was going on in Slovenia connected to the radical social movements in the wider world, the student and political movements and the liberalization of sexual mores and behaviour. But there was also a terrific philosophical movement in Ljubljana, connected especially to French structuralism and the Frankfurt school. What became known as the later orthodox Lacanian school thus had its origins in this turn towards structuralism, a move which the Yugoslav authorities had great difficulty with. If we think of the aforementioned Tel Quel, we can say that its motto was ‘Rimbaud and Lautréamont from the 19th century, Artaud and Bataille from the 20th century’. So what separated us and Tel Quel from the Praxis group was, of course, structuralism, but structuralism understood in a broad sense, which included, for example, the surrealist element and some of the dissident poets I have mentioned. It really was at this point a ‘unity in difference’ and even when we went on to embrace Lacan, one should not forget that Lacan is very linked to this broader framework of the French avant-garde. For example, his doctoral work was on surrealism. Praxis, however, as an intellectual ideology and grouping, couldn’t support us in some of these new aspects: they took particular exception to our positive employment of the work of Louis Althusser, as they saw him (correctly) as attacking the very basis of humanism. Insofar as Praxis remained premised on a humanism, the ‘early Marx’ so to speak, Althusserianism constituted a significant threat. Indeed, Althusser was a very divisive figure in Marxism and beyond, precisely because of his avowed anti-humanism. Lacan was the key figure for us only retrospectively. At this point, all the main figures were being affirmed; Derrida, Althusser, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Kristeva, the lifeblood of the journal Tel Quel. However, later, this common framework was to break down.

What one should also mention here is that, politically, things had been liberalizing through the 1960s in Yugoslavia. This took place from 1965’s so-called ‘economic reform’ onwards, leading to a more market economy. This period of liberalization was seen as having got out of hand by the authorities in the early 1970s. For example, I have said already how 1971 was a key period of unrest in Ljubljana. So, the economic reform had been accompanied by cultural reform and there was especially the issue of a reactionary nationalism, which was becoming more acute, particularly in Croatia. In 1971, Tito forcibly removed the political leadership of Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, replacing the left liberals with a more hard-line conservative wing of the regime. The Praxis group was also dissipated at this time, dismantled by the regime as part of the critique of the progressive liberal left wing in Yugoslavia. The 1970s was thus a period of shutting down, of closure after the more recent period of openness and flowering. At this time, we were governed by a bleak and bureaucratic style of organization and politics, but we carried on in Ljubljana trying to keep the spirit of 1968 and 1971 alive. Slavoj, I and others continued to be deeply involved in Problemi and other cultural and philosophical journals and movements, throughout the 1970s.

While the younger generation of philosophers and cultural thinkers had embraced the fusion of Marxist and more ‘Continentalist’ elements, there remained a distinct hostility to French contemporary ‘Continental’ thought more generally in Slovenia as it was seen as being in revolt (both implicitly and explicitly) with more orthodox versions of Marxism central to the Yugoslav system. This is perhaps best exemplified by Slavoj’s difficulties in having his work recognized by the academy and also with his later difficulties in securing a post within the Slovenian academic system in philosophy. Central to the possibility of our intellectual revolution (and I cannot overstate this enough) was the singular story of Slavoj Žižek – I can speak of him unquestionably as a brilliant genius. Slavoj’s work took its cue from the French structuralist school (also influenced by Marx and Hegel) but he had already published a book early in the 1970s on Heidegger and Derrida, entitled The Pain of Difference. Žižek submitted his MA thesis in 1975, on the topic of structuralism, entitled ‘Sign, Signifier and Writing’. It was rejected by the Ljubljana academic authorities not for any issue of competence (it was unquestionably brilliant) but precisely because of what was perceived as its problematic relationship to Marxism, its obvious challenge to the more stilted orthodoxy. The question became where did his thesis stand in relation to Yugoslav Marxism, that particular brand of what Tito termed ‘self-management’ socialism, based on the principle of ‘nonalignment’? Žižek was asked to write an additional chapter which would explain his relation to Marxism more clearly and he did so. His thesis was thus finally passed and he was promised an assistant professorship, but this job never materialized. This was an unusual situation, a philosopher recognized as brilliant was unemployed. I do not speak too strongly when I describe this as a ‘scandal’: it was certainly seen as such at the time and made Žižek infamous. But what underlied this situation was an issue which would become central to the work of the Slovenian School of Psychoanalysis – what is the relation between Marxism and psychoanalysis? Of course, Žižek being Žižek, he did manage to get a post eventually in the Institute for Sociology and through this post he supported a whole range of work of his contemporaries in philosophy, for example, in his work as editor to the book series Analecta.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: As you say, at this point in time, there was a perceived affinity in your work, as in Žižek’s, between structuralism and Marxism, and the former was seen as an intellectual movement of ‘unity in diversity’. However, this approach was to be superseded in the late 1970s by what has become the more famous method, that of a specific kind of Lacanianism. Can you clarify how and why Lacan became the key intellectual influence?

Mladen Dolar: If structuralism was the first influence in a broad and eclectic sense of its meaning, then certainly, as the 1970s progressed, Lacan became the more defining line of interpretation and conceptualization. Again, we can focus this problematic to its most important nodal point – that of the theme of the subject. The theme of the subject is the key for the distinct Lacanian emphasis in our work, although it is far from being the only rationale for this Lacanian turn. Structuralism, of course, can be seen as precisely a critique of the subject, as in Foucault’s infamous ‘death of man’ and ‘death of the subject’ theses. What was evinced consequently by the structuralist revolution in philosophy was a supposedly ‘subjectless structure’. ‘The subject is an effect’ is the bottom line of structuralism. For Lacan, on the other hand, the subject is always there at the level of the structure itself; the subject is non-ideological. The subject is a short circuit of the structure (Short Circuits became a book series edited by Žižek for MIT Press to which a number of Slovenian authors contributed). Structuralism was based on a fantasy of the pure matrix of the symbolic. But the unconscious is the crack in the structure there because of the malfunctioning of the structure. We are the subjects of the unconscious, which goes against the grain of the Althusserian concept of interpellation which sees all subjectivity as ideological through and through. Because of the unconscious, one cannot recognize oneself in the structure. Thus, a point of non-recognition creates the subject.

The subject is always already there, one has to think the notion of the subject in any philosophy worthy of the name and this is where structuralism falls down ultimately. It also explains the singularity of Lacan from our perspective at the time, and this shouldn’t be divorced from the political questions in Slovenia. In a sense, we needed a theory of the subject and Lacan allowed us such a theory in a way which the other structuralist thinkers, including Althusser, did not. At the same time, what Althusser did allow and what linked him to Lacan (as he explicitly demonstrated in his own readings of Lacan) was an anti-humanism, a move away from more traditionalist humanist concerns. Despite the worth of the Praxis school and its links to the Frankfurt school, this was thus the missing element there. The Praxis and Frankfurt schools remained too traditionally humanist from our perspective. They needed to be supplemented with a more radical understanding of the human which was evidenced in Lacan’s anti-humanism and in the more radical fringes of the psychoanalytical reading of politics and culture. Despite all our differences with Badiou, for example, this is what links his work to ours.

Here we can trace a lineage which has become important in the work of the school – the line which connects Descartes to Kant to Hegel, the story of the subject, beginning with Cartesian subjectivity. However, this is a philosophical problematic which goes back to the early Greeks. Plato’s Parmenides, on which I have written recently, for example, foregrounds the two paradigms of the One and the Two, which have dominated philosophy since. Here, the influence of Kojève on Lacan is not insignificant. And what marked Slovenian structuralism out from its compatriots in different sociocultural contexts, was precisely the continuing relation to Hegel. We might argue that our brand of philosophizing was thus more eclectic and more heterodox than most, fusing elements that were usually divided. We were quite a heterogeneous group to begin with in the 1970s, under trying circumstances, but often the laughter kept us going and Slavoj’s high comedy spirit.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: This is a fascinating genealogy of the Lacanian emphasis in your work and the work of the Slovenian school more generally. In 1980, you left Slovenia to study at Vincennes in Paris. Can you say something about the detail and significance of this period for your theoretical work?

Mladen Dolar: I went to France by complete coincidence. I met a friend on the street in Ljubljana and he told me that there were two bursaries left for Slovenian postgraduate study in France. It was a late application but I was successful and I went to Paris in 1979, as I received a grant for an academic year. 1980 was a pivotal year for French philosophy and especially the legacy of the French structuralist movement which had originally been such an influence on us in Ljubljana. It was, one could say, ‘the last moment’ of Lacan and Foucault, whose lectures I followed. Sartre died in 1980 and the figures of Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss were still highly influential. 1980 was thus, in every sense, a formative year for me, it formed me in great vigour. One could say that it was in effect the last year of the original ‘spirit of structuralism’. If we look back to 1970, it is clear that structuralism (as understood in a Slovenian context) was a ‘unified heterogeneity’. But in 1980, it was now Lacan who was the key figure of influence. Why? I would say because Lacan is the thinker whose thought can take the impact the most. But I have a great passion for all of these figures, I view them through a non-sectarian lens, although my own orientation is now fundamentally Lacanian. For example, Deleuze’s thought is fundamentally anti-psychoanalytic (especially the work with Guattari) and indeed the same goes for Foucault if we understand that his History of Sexuality is primarily a criticism of psychoanalysis, a genealogy of the psychoanalytic paradigm. Nonetheless, I have learnt and continue to learn a lot from these thinkers, despite the opposition.

The history of thought progresses by huge leaps and epochal shifts. For example, one can think of the Greek period and of the modern period of Kant and Schelling. But this period of the 1970s and 1980s was also key; one has to recognize that the period of French structuralism was a time of immense intellectual tumult. In 1980, one had huge intellectual philosopher ‘stars’ in the sense that the French have a tradition of philosophers as stars, from Voltaire to Sartre, both of whom had what might be termed ‘phantasmatic presences’ in their own country and indeed worldwide. Vincennes, the university I studied at in Paris, had a very particular relation to this tradition, having been created as a result of the 1968 demonstrations. Vincennes was, in effect, an experiment. The lease had been signed for 10 years and 1980 became the last year of Vincennes, its eleventh year. Its location in the middle of a park in a series of prefabricated buildings in a district of significant ethnic and class diversity already gave a clear sign of the specificity of this institution. Additionally, the lecturers who had been appointed there reinforced this: Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Badiou, Judith Lacan. It was a place where illegal substances were traded openly, a place which was incredibly democratic and where terrorists and freedom fighters from Africa and South America came to learn about political instruction. The French students doing a formal degree there were, ironically, in a significant minority. It was a real social mix, all strata of society were represented there and there was what one might call a universal vision of philosophy at work. One would have to queue for hours beforehand to hear Foucault speak. But despite the universal appeal and commitment to philosophy as a practice, there were also very significant tensions evident. Badiou’s presence in the department, as a Maoist, was very divisive for some. For example, Badiou read Deleuze’s work, his colleague, as that of an anarcho-capitalist and he vehemently rejected this approach to philosophy and society. It wasn’t until just before Deleuze’s death that Badiou would seek some reconciliation between the two, in terms of his book on Deleuze, The Clamour of Being. Badiou’s book is thus a statement which represents both the very real conflict between the two figures but also the respect which nonetheless remained and the eventual rapprochement. I was still in Paris when they ‘erased Vincennes’, when the lease ran out and they moved the university to St Denis. One can say with all respect that the university was never the same afterwards; what had gone on before was now socially impossible, a last remnant of the 1968 spirit; the spirit was never the same again.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: So you returned to Ljubljana in late 1980. This was also a period of great change in Slovenian society, where we might say the spirit of Vincennes lived on. Can you explain some of these developments leading up to independence for Slovenia in 1991, with special reference to some of the important Slovenian Art movements known as NSK, and also their relation to the philosophical movement which you were a part of?

Mladen Dolar: Yes, I returned to Ljubljana in late 1980 and began a PhD thesis on Hegel and Lacan. This certainly was a period of great tumult in Slovenian society, with things again opening up after the closed approach of the 1970s. Slovene history is complex and people speak of there being no unified military power and no political autonomy in our history. But what kept Slovenia together, what maintained the identity, was the culture and the literature. This again happens in the 1980s. Here, I can mention as an example the punk movements and its developments, especially the issues of the so-called Punk Problemi issues which show the intersection of different genres of culture, from 1981. I can talk of the art movements such as NSK, including the internationally known Laibach and IRWIN. Of course, connected to these were the political developments and movements, leading to eventual independence for Slovenia. Here, certainly there is a difference within our intellectual troika between myself and Slavoj on the one side and Alenka Zupančič on the other, insofar as Alenka comes from a later generation and perhaps experiences at least some of these developments in retrospect or from a different angle.

What we also have to recognize is the tension within and between these various movements seemingly going on in tandem. For example, the punk movement especially can be seen as rejecting the notion of traditional Slovene culture and the paradigm of a national poetry or aesthetic. They rejected this paradigm vehemently. Similarly, the artistic movements, although seeming to affirm a sense of Slovenian and indeed Slavic identity in their work (especially IRWIN) can be seen as also critiquing this very same culture. There is a particular strategy at work here, what some commentators have termed a strategy of overidentification with the dominant ideology. This approach, while appearing complicit, is actually subversive of the maintenance of the ideology. Žižek, for example, in several texts, has asked the question ‘why were the NSK important?’. He comes to the conclusion that the NSK actually developed a very subtle philosophical framework, which he describes as Lacanian–Althusserian. Again, this demonstrates strong connections between the art movements and philosophical movements in Slovenia, or at least that between NSK and the Lacanian orientation in the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. For my part, the key question here is the topic of fascism. I wrote a book on fascism in 1982 and I have been significantly interested in this topic throughout my philosophical trajectory. It is relevant to why, for example, we were found guilty of publishing pornography with the Punk Problemi issues. We can say that at issue here is the question of the interpretation of elements which often overidentify with certain extremist ideologies. But the artistic and philosophical works are often far more complex to understand than the criteria applied by the police and legal procedures would allow. As for NSK, I thought that collectively they were a brilliant manifestation of the critique of fascist ideology, precisely walking the thin blue line. Their quasi-Nazi imagery was profoundly unsettling. One can also mention here the video art of FV, which if anything was more transgressive and direct (and more ‘pornographic’) than NSK, each contributing to what we might term the Slovenian ‘alternative culture’.

There is also the question of nationalism and how the political movements, in seeking independence, partook of a nationalism which was reactive. This is interesting not simply for the difference in view between philosophers and politicians but also for the different perspectives evident in Slovenian philosophy as opposed to that, for example, in France. Badiou, for example, has taken a rather more negative perspective on the Slovenian independence movements than any of us within the Ljubljana troika. Here the question could be framed thus: was 1991 a betrayal of Marx, as Badiou suggests it was?

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: What this also raises is the question of the ‘civil society’ in Slovenia. To what extent did a civil society develop which was independent of the state sector? This is a question which several important Slovenian commentators have taken up in their work, arguing for a very specific relation between civic culture and alternative culture in the Slovenian context. Can you also say something about the relation between Yugoslavia and the West?

Mladen Dolar: Yes, there is a complex relation here, as you describe. Civil society can sometimes be very conservative and reactionary as for example Mastnak has described in his work as a ‘totalitarianism from below’. We might cite as a recent example the case of the Tea Party in the USA. This is a grass roots but nonetheless right-wing view of civil society. In Yugoslavia, there was a complicated relation between civil society and alternative culture, and commentators especially associated with the punk movement, such as Gregor Tomc, have seen the alternative social movements as developing in opposition to civil society and the state rather than developing as part of a civil society opposed to the state. In many respects, civil society also looked unfavourably on these alternative movements.

With regard to Yugoslavia, we can say that Yugoslavia represented a kind of ‘unconscious’ for the West, which can be seen as a condescending attitude. In particular, we can see the attitude of Western Marxism towards this version of self-management socialism as indicative of a sense that this was the way forward, without looking at some of the inner tensions and social lack of freedoms which contradicted the very philosophies, which these leftist ideologies were seeking to espouse. In this way, we can again cite the singular importance of Žižek in our trajectory, in that he is a thinker who cannot be condescended to. From The Sublime Object of Ideology onwards, that is from 1989, we can say that Žižek restructures the Western agenda of Marxism (the foreword to that text for example comes from Laclau). Žižek’s reading of the Yugoslavian context and of the situation of communism more generally thus has a singular import. It also relates to the whole issue of ‘Eastern Europe’ and the way that the latter concept is interpreted in the West, where it tends to be viewed in a reactive way, as backward culturally and philosophically. This is also a thematic in the work of Laibach and IRWIN, who as part of the NSK, while critiquing a certain Easternist ideology, nonetheless also defined a certain Slavic or Eastern identity as specific and worthy, both from an artistic and political perspective.

Here, one interesting case of this condescension or problematic relation between East and West can be evidenced in the interpretation of the Slovenian situation by Badiou. Badiou and Rancière came to Ljubljana in 1993, giving ten lectures, five lectures each. We can say that this was a very important moment in the history of the Slovenian School of Psychoanalysis. Since that date, the relation between Badiou and Žižek especially has become increasingly important. Similarly, we can cite the fact that Zupančič has studied with Badiou, at St Denis, the successor to Vincennes (Zupančič cites this as key for her in her interview). With regard to those lectures in Ljubljana, we can cite Badiou’s Theory of the Subject as a key text.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: The philosophical orientation of the troika of Slovenian thinkers has been described as ‘ultraorthodox Lacanianism’. For some, this might be viewed as a rather dogmatic approach to philosophy. Can you articulate first, the relation between psychoanalysis and philosophy in your own work and second, your conception of this issue of supposed ‘dogmatism’ linked to orthodoxy.

Mladen Dolar: For me, there are no real dialogues in the philosophical tradition, one cannot have dialogues between philosophical opponents, and in this I follow, for example Deleuze’s thinking. As Deleuze observes somewhere, ‘never has a thought against made any difference’. This is an important point for an understanding of the evolution of Slovenian neo-Lacanianism and it can also be said to develop faithfully out of a meta-level understanding of the philosophical and psychoanalytical enterprise in Lacan’s own work. For Lacan, a certain grounding of a thinking is constitutive, a certain positivism is key. It is only starting from a well-defined philosophical position that we can be open to other perspectives. This, for example, is a paradigmatic difference between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derrida’s deconstruction, which Žižek especially has made clear. However, one must be careful in the designation of Lacanianism as dogmatic if one takes the latter to mean a refusal to be open to difference. This is not the case with Lacan as it is clear from even a cursory reading of his work that there is an extraordinarily wide range of authors employed and discussed. Lacan’s work is truly eclectic and affirmative of difference in precisely this sense. Nonetheless on the other hand, one can say, from a Lacanian perspective that every good philosophy has been dogmatic, that is, having the courage to take the dogmatic decision. Dogma is the expression of the freedom of spirit, a fundamental decision.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: If we locate the decision to develop an orthodox Lacanianism in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with special reference to the Parisian context, can you articulate how this Lacanian philosophy has developed from a conceptual point of view since that time?

Mladen Dolar: A key moment here is obviously Žižek’s first main work in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology. Žižek had been writing books since the early 1970s in Slovenian and my own work in essay and book form also dates from an earlier period, especially through the 1980s. In the late 1980s, Žižek had published a book in French but (as he himself has acknowledged) this did not really develop an interest in the way he had wished. However, The Sublime Object of Ideology precisely marks the moment of the arrival of Slovenian philosophy on a global stage. I have already spoken for example of the foreword by Ernesto Laclau as being symbolic in terms of its reception by the Western Left, which relates back to our earlier discussion of East and West relations. Second, this book represents the beginning of a whole series of texts in English by Slovenian authors, both by Žižek himself, as well as edited anthologies by Žižek which include Slovenian authors such as myself and Alenka (for example, All You Ever Wanted to Know . . .), as well as monograph texts in English by Alenka and I. This then is the origin of Slovenian neo-Lacanianism, in English. But what I have been suggesting and what your book demonstrates is that while acknowledging the importance of Slavoj, we must also say that he was not a giant standing alone. Rather, his work is best understood as the culmination of a whole series of intellectual and cultural discussions and conflicts which originate in the Slovenian context, from the late 1960s onwards. My own work and Alenka’s are also a significant part of this evolution, as well as a whole series of Slovenian authors, some of whom appear in translation more recently (such as Renata Salecl etc.) but also we must mention the artistic and political movements which were part of this ferment. You asked me, Jones, at one point, ‘Mladen, did you know Laibach, personally?’ but truly this is only a question which a foreigner could ask. What we need to understand in this context is the intense interaction between these distinct movements in a Slovenian context, focused on the cultural hubbub of Ljubljana. What Žižek’s 1989 work does is to open out this cultural context to the wider world, in a way that goes beyond the usual exoticism of the East etc. What this also allows is for other Slovenian work to be considered in its own right. Thus, while there are strong connections between Lacanian thinking in Slovenian, especially in our own troika of intellectual friendship, that is between my work, Alenka’s and Slavoj’s, nonetheless there is no homogeneity here. Rather there are distinctions to be made in this context too, between the various ways our work has evolved and developed.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Let us return to that question of the specifics of the work, especially in a conceptual sense. You have spoken of Lacan’s understanding of the theory of the subject as key to an understanding of his specific difference from structuralism. At the same time, his anti-humanism distances him from the more revisionist approaches to Marxism, such as that of the Praxis group. What other conceptual aspects of Lacan’s work would you foreground as crucial for a reading of your own work?

Mladen Dolar: Above, I spoke in detail about the importance of the theory of the subject in Lacan and how this differentiated him, for example, from the wider movement of structuralism. However, at the same time, we can speak of the importance of the notion and theme of the object in Lacan. To speak precisely, an object in Lacan’s sense is not an object at all, it is not objectively existing in any way, not being something you can lay your hands on, and this is absolutely essential from an ontological viewpoint. Lacan sees his view of the object as his singular contribution to philosophy as it involves the reframing of the very notion of philosophy itself. In the same way, we might argue that the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis is also involved in a reframing of what contemporary philosophy means.

This is not a new problematic as such but goes back to the very first meta-level discussions of the role of philosophy in early Greek philosophy, as Plato often articulates in his texts. For example, we can speak here of the dramatization of Parmenides by Plato (in his dialogue of the same name), in which there is a stark contrast between the Way of Being on the one side and the Way of NonBeing on the other. For Parmenides, it seems that the Way of Being is the only way, that this constitutes a dividing line between philosophy and anti-philosophy. Lacan focuses here on Plato’s enigmatic text the Sophist and I, in a recent text, have analysed in detail Plato’s related text the Parmenides. In the Sophist, the Stranger is presented as killing father Parmenides, of in effect carrying out a parricide against philosophy proper by arguing for an inversion of the Parmenidean thesis. That is, the Stranger argues (contra Parmenides) that being is not and only non-being is. This dualism between being and non-being needs to be understood, however, in a modern context philosophically to understand its true import. Here we can cite Hegel’s Logic, where Hegel, in a discussion of the relation between being and non-being, adds a lengthy footnote on Parmenides. It is a mistake, Hegel tells us, to choose between being and non-being. Being and non-being are one – and Hegelian dialectics starts by getting rid of this very distinction. One can argue that Plato already understood this, both against Parmenides and against the Stranger (the latter whom, among other figures, might be seen as a representation of Heraclitus). Like Hegel, Plato is also, on some accounts, a dialectical thinker. And, again, what I want to claim is that Lacan can be seen precisely in this lineage of thought, in relation to his thinking of the dialectic between subject and object. For Lacan, as for me. The subject’s perception of being can only come through the object, which however is not a real object at all, what Lacan calls the objet petit a. Here it is precisely the division between the subject and object which is indivisible; the division is constitutive, the between. That is, both the subject and object become divisible while the division between them is irreducible in itself. Here the Ljubljana school follows very closely the readings of Lacan’s son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller. In effect, this then is the thematic of psychoanalysis. We can also say here that while there can be reference back to the earlier premodern tradition (here for example that of Greek philosophy), that ultimately psychoanalysis can only truly happen after Descartes, after the modern ‘Copernican’ revolution in philosophy. Žižek says somewhere that philosophy proper begins with Kant and I would agree with this wholeheartedly, although, as I have suggested, there are metaphoric approximations or suggestions of similar themes and insights in the work of earlier thinkers such as the Presocratics and Plato. Psychoanalysis only makes sense in a Cartesian or Galilean world. It is the subject which emerges with Descartes. The subject is different from the ego or consciousness and in this way, undoubtedly, Descartes does not truly realize the importance or insight of his own discovery. Lacan is thus, we might say, neo-Cartesian or neo-Kantian. For Lacan, the cogito is a crack in the structure of the universe. Lacan also demarcates his own evolution of the Cartesian and Kantian subjects as follows. On the one side, the Kantian subject which is a transcendental subject is said to be ‘subjectively objective’, that is, the objective structure is mediated subjectively and understood by the subject. The Lacanian subject, on the other hand, is said to be ‘objectively subjective’. That is, the structure of the subject as unconscious is not accessible to the subject; it is only accessible ‘objectively’ as the structure of this very subjectivity, which is in itself hollow or void, without content.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: One question we would have here is in relation to the question of agreement and disagreement among the ‘troika’. For example, in relation to the issue of the ‘subject’, would you say that there is complete agreement? With regard to the other related themes and concepts of Lacanianism, where do the significant agreements and disagreements lie?

Mladen Dolar: I would say that in fundamental terms we are in complete agreement, although of course there are also differences in emphasis and direction of thinking. We agree on the Copernican revolution as irreducible between the modern and premoderns, as I have suggested, and that psychoanalysis is a post-Cartesian development or can only be understood in such a context. However, one significant difference which I could cite here between my own work and that of Slavoj’s, for example, is in relation to the question of the premodern question of theology and God. Whereas my own work takes the Nietzschean declaration that ‘God is dead’ as paradigmatic, and thus consigns premodern metaphysics to a metaphorical status only, Žižek’s work has shown increasing signs of a more differentiated and complex relation to theology and the premodern works of metaphysics, for example in his work with John Milbank (the recent text, The Monstrosity of Christ and his forthcoming work with a Croatian theologian). This might be seen as a significant distinction, although I wouldn’t overplay it in contrast to the more fundamental agreement. One might also mention that Žižek’s work has become more and more focused on the Lacanian notion of the Real, in a way that perhaps is more distinctive than in mine or Alenka’s works. Similarly, this notion of the Real has undergone a transformation in Slavoj’s work and this has become very central in his recent work, especially as the Real is mediated through transgressive moments in cinema. To what extent this is a reading against Lacan, is open to question, as, for Lacan, the Real designated more of an inaccessible notion. Žižek himself (in The Plague of Fantasies) speaks of the need (following Paul de Man) for ‘reading as disfiguration’, which is an interesting way to think about Lacan’s own method of reading, and which brings deconstruction and psychoanalysis perhaps closer than one might have thought.

Similarly, Alenka’s work perhaps takes up the issue of Nietzsche’s declaration slightly differently in her text on Nietzsche and also her emphasis on the relation between desire and drive is somewhat specific, in her work on comedy. Again there are interesting questions here in relation to when the issue of drive becomes foregrounded in Lacan’s own work. It really only becomes a key notion in his later work, whereas the notion of desire and the symbolic is prominent in the early Lacan. In the same vein, my own work on the voice as partial object (in The Voice and Nothing More) retains a distinctiveness from the work of the other thinkers.

Helena Motoh and Jones Irwin: Your own work also evidences a profound engagement with the work of Hegel, from your PhD onwards. While this is also a distinctive feature of the other two thinkers’ work, it is perhaps more pronounced in your own work. Can you conclude by saying something about this specific interpretation of Hegel in your work and how this relates to your own understanding of Lacanianism?

Mladen Dolar: Certainly, my fascination with Hegel goes back a long way, especially as you suggest in his relation to Lacan. I would cite here a key source, the lectures of Kojève, 1934–39, which Lacan (among other key French luminaries) attended diligently. Lacan was profoundly influenced by an understanding of Hegel, but he does not have an independent take on Hegel, and this is crucial to how we understand some of his limitations as a thinker. Like philosophers such as Georges Bataille, Lacan’s Hegel comes only through Kojève’s lectures, although as with Bataille, this is not to say that he simply repeats the Kojèvian interpretation. Rather, his reading takes its cue from Kojève, while taking it in his own direction. For Kojève, famously, the understanding of Hegel is as an anthropological thinker, whose thinking is framed in relation to the master–slave dialectic from The Phenomenology of Spirit. For me, as a reader of Hegel, outside the Kojèvian circle I might say, this is a complete misconception of Hegel’s original texts. The master–slave dialectic is not, in my view, key to Hegel and he is not an anthropological or existentialist thinker, as Kojève understood it. But as I have suggested earlier, it is sometimes precisely through misreading, interpretative distortion or by accident, that we get the most extraordinary understandings. We might speak similarly of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, which is also powerfully influenced by Kojève, as a great text but, in many ways, similarly mistaken in its reading of Hegel. Kojève thus gets Hegel wrong in my view, badly wrong, but still comes up with a powerful thinking which becomes paradigmatic for a whole generation. Even Deleuze acknowledges this when he says that ‘poor is the generation who doesn’t have the master’, referring to the benefits of Sartre’s hegemony for his own generation, a point that Lacan reiterates elsewhere (in relation to May 1968, for example). The figure of the master, in other words, gives one the freedom of thought and for Deleuze’s generation, despite all the conflicts, Sartre was still a kind of philosophical master.

In my PhD on Hegel and Lacan, I argue that there is a very different Hegel to Kojève’s and Lacan’s which, if understood correctly, would come far closer to Lacan’s own understanding of psychoanalysis than the Hegel which he presents as a kind of philosophical straw man. Nonetheless, Kojève’s misunderstanding of Hegel was key to the evolution of Lacan’s own thinking and, we must say, immensely productive. This was an extremely fortuitous philosophical mistake or error, which can also tell us something very important on a meta-level in relation to the progress of philosophy, or the supposed progress of philosophy. So we can say simultaneously that this was a hugely productive misunderstanding which nonetheless limited Lacan’s thinking in key respects. Again, this demonstrates that orthodox Lacanianism as we call it should not simply repeat the mistakes of the master, should not be so modest as to not point out the mistakes of the master, to the contrary.

Also, I can cite a related point. ‘Not to give up on Hegel’ is also a key rallying cry of the Slovenian neo-Lacanians. Any orthodoxy worthy of the name has to come up with a radical innovation which also calls into question what orthodoxy means. It certainly does not constitute sterility as might be suggested for example by deconstructive or neo-Derridean opponents. One might think here of Judith Butler’s attack on what she sees as the ‘fixity of the Lacanian conception of the Real’, which she speaks of as occluding the possibility of philosophical or political transformation. Rather, I would say that orthodoxy is transformation – Žižek takes up this point, for example, in his reading of GK Chesterton. Paradoxically, then, I can mention that despite my holding unequivocally to Nietzsche’s declaration that ‘God is dead’, that I can also see the worth of thinkers in the Christian tradition such as Pascal, Kierkegaard and Augustine. In each of these cases, we can say (albeit for different reasons) that orthodoxy is transformation. This is true then, despite the simultaneous truth of the fact that Nietzsche’s declaration that ‘God is dead’ philosophically demonstrates that there is an impossibility in God any longer being the condition of freedom. We might thus say something analogous, in conclusion, of the adherence to an orthodox (even ‘ultraorthodox’) Lacanianism among our troika. Such an orthodoxy does not designate intellectual stagnation or dogmatism and neither does it designate an uncritical acceptance of all elements of the philosophical inheritance. To the contrary, in essence, our Lacanian emphasis signifies the transformative dimension of orthodoxy and ‘positioning’ in philosophy. In this case, it has involved no less than a reframing of the very nature of philosophy, from Marx through to structuralism (as ‘unity in diversity’) through to Lacan and finally, through to the Ljubljana ‘moment’. [Interview ends]

Conclusion – Dolar: Breaking through the impasse

Dolar’s interview provides us with a rich and varied sense of the trajectory not simply of his own work, but of the work of the Ljubljana School of Psychonanalysis as a whole. He has led us with great dexterity through the early days, the 1968 and 1971 moments in Slovenia and the early critique of state socialism coming through, for example, the ‘critique of the red bourgeoisie’ in civil society. We know from Gantar’s work that this critique was to remain limited (Gantar 1993) and this highlights the very great importance of the emerging discourse of renewed critique which Dolar led (alongside Žižek and others such as Močnik) in the late 1970s and 1980s, especially in relation to two key aspects. First, in terms of the intra-philosophical acute discussion which led initially to an embracing of the wide (and then new) field of French structuralism through the influential Parisian journal Tel Quel. Consequently, and crucially, a more singular affirmation of Lacanianism emerged as a specific and particular example of the possibility of ‘breakthrough’, of transgressing the paralysis of societal and psychic ‘impasse’ (Močnik 1993).

Dolar’s second key contribution can be connected to his relation to alternative culture and particularly, the movements of punk and the NSK. As we have already seen, the bridge between intellectuals and alternative culture in this context was surprising and somewhat unique. Slovenia seems to have been one of the only places where such a dialogue between alternative culture and young intellectuals such as Dolar and Žižek was possible and what it allowed was a supersession of the limitations of the ‘civil society’ forms of resistance, a breaking through what, for example, Močnik has described as the ‘colonisation of the life world’ (Močnik 1993).

But as with Močnik, Dolar’s own work displays no simple nationalist or (Slovene) culturalist bias and has remained as subversive and critical of ideological issues and problems, post-independence in Slovenia, as before. Here again, we can see the continuity between Dolar’s most central work (for example, on the ‘voice’ [Dolar 2006]) and his earlier and seminal work (with Žižek) on the changing conceptions of the ‘symptom’ in Lacanianism as it relates to political ideology most especially, from fascism to socialism to contemporary capitalism (Žižek 1981: Dolar 1982). If we think back to the original analysis there, contemporary regime critics of the punk movement had used the term ‘symptom’ as the meaning of a sign of an underlying disease. We might say that this was in line with a more standard reading of the notion of ‘symptom’ in Marxism, or as Žižek puts it ‘how Marx invented the symptom’ (Žižek 1989). This approach to diagnosing an underlying problem with societal (e.g., socio-economic or ‘base’) structures in Marxism could be connected to an apparently similar strategy in certain versions of ‘adaptive’ psychoanalysis, supposedly derived faithfully from Freud (e.g., ego psychology or even Marcuse’s version of psychoanalysis [referred to as ‘psychoanalytic essentialism’ in Žižek 1989]). The Yugoslav/Slovene regime’s critical reading of the ‘punk movement’, then, saw punk precisely as a negative symptom in this way (as Motoh [2012] titles her recent essay, ‘Punk is a Symptom’).

Žižek’s editorial for Problemi in 1981 (written perhaps in conjunction with Dolar, who was the official editor) is precisely entitled ‘Punk is a Symptom’ (Žižek 1981). The editorial states: ‘Thus, their diagnosis was that punk warns us of an alarming danger of “nihilist”, “foreign” or even “anarchist and fascist” tendencies among the young generation, a spreading disease that needs to be “cured”, thereby also taking care of the symptom’ (Žižek 1981: 26). In a poignant moment, however, of what we might call conceptual (or ideological) reversal, the editorial turns the concept of symptom back against the state system itself: ‘The symptom, however, reveals an intrusion of the suppressed “truth” of the most calm, most normal everyday life, of exactly that life that is so shocked and annoyed by it. Symptom returns our suppressed truth in a perverted form. . . . punk literally enacts the suppressed aspect of “normality” and thereby “liberates”, it introduces a defamiliarizing distance’ (Žižek 1981: 27). If punk is a symptom, and it would clearly seem to be, this is not a diagnosis of an underlying problem with punk or the alternative culture itself, but precisely of an underlying problem with the system (which punk can now be seen as ‘liberative’ from). Some of the ambiguity over the authorship of some of these short pieces in the early 1980s (Žižek 1981; Žižek et al. 1984; Dolar 1982) might precisely have been because of the dangers inherent in the clear articulation of such a critique of ideology in the former Yugoslavia. We will return to the specifics of Žižek’s ideology critique in the next chapter. What is also striking in this context is the introduction by Dolar/Žižek of a clear and important distinction between what they here term ‘dogmatic’ and ‘nondogmatic’ forms of Marxism (Žižek 1981: 28): ‘If the distinction between non-dogmatic and dogmatic Marxism has any meaning, this distinction must (also) mean that – when research of the social phenomena encounters a symptomatic point – “the symptom” is above all allowed to speak, without being “understood” (reduced to what is already known) in advance. Such is the aim of the present issue’ (Žižek 1981: 28). Here, it would seem that the regime’s attempt to silence or penalize Problemi for publishing the punk issues is associated with dogmatic Marxism, while the Problemi editorial board claim the ‘nondogmatic’ Marxist angle. While this claim to being free of dogmatism is not surprising, more startling is the very invocation of Marx, given the pre-history of problems for the group through the 1970s (Dolar et al. 2014) precisely with the relation between French theory and Marx, as outlined in the interview above. Nonetheless, it is clear that the Problemi board consider themselves the more authentic Marxists, precisely in their disavowal of dogmatism (a reading of Marx strongly in line, for example with, among others, Balibar [2007]).

But, to conclude our analysis of Dolar’s work for now, it is perhaps not coincidental that the later evolution of the counter-culture, in the form of the NSK (Monroe 2005), takes a less ‘direct’ approach to matters ideological. In an article on the succeeding avant-garde, Dolar clearly notes the origins of the NSK in the punk movement: ‘Just like NSK, IRWIN grew out of the punk movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s which enacted a big shock back then’ (Dolar 2003: 155). However, he also notes a significant difference in approach to ideology: ‘[there was] no irony or game when it came to ideology. IRWIN were so hard to classify’ (Dolar 2003: 155). This lack (or refusal) of irony or distance when it came to the exploration of the state socialist ideology in the later Yugoslav (and Slovenian) avant-garde marks a significant shift from the unequivocal and vitriolic assault on state ideology by punk (and later FV 112/15) (Motoh 2012). It is an artistic and philosophical strategy of ideology critique which will become known as ‘overidentification’ or to employ a concept we spoke of in Chapter 1, ‘retro-gardism’ (Monroe 2005). We will see, in the succeeding chapters, how this more complicated form of ideology critique will also be practiced in more recent texts by the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis.