We don’t know what will become of this psychoanalysis
(LACAN 2008: 3)
Introduction
In this book, we have explored the complex dynamics of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, beginning with the narrative of Žižek and Dolar in the late 1960s as students of philosophy in Slovenia, experiencing the social and political tumult of those years. Through their 1970s encounter with French structuralism (often against the norms of the authorities in the former Yugoslavia), we began to see a specific Lacanianism emerge. Through the 1980s, this Lacanianism was put to the sociopolitical test in a number of relations with aspects of the alternative culture from punk through to FV 112/15 through to the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) (Motoh 2012). Here, we see the truth of Močnik’s thesis about the Slovenian figure of Lacan constituting a kind of breakthrough against the ‘impasse’ (Močnik 1993) – an impasse which can be understood philosophically in relation to the wider movement of French structuralism or, more politically, in terms of the system of the former Yugoslavia. In Chapter 1, we traced, in brief, some of the main contours of the political struggle which saw the breakup of the former Yugoslavia into its national constituent parts. However, this ‘outcome’ of an emergent nationalism should not be seen as some kind of teleology on behalf of the Lacanian school. Močnik, for example, was famously opposed to the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, although critical of the state socialism in the way we have seen, have remained wary of some of the new political developments. In his essay ‘Eastern European Liberalism and Its Discontents’, for example, Žižek describes how the situation after independence is not just problematic because of supposed rogue nationalist elements but because of the tensions within the model of democracy itself: ‘the only way to prevent the emergence of proto-Fascist nationalist hegemony is to call into question the very standard of “normality”, the universal framework of liberal-democratic capitalism, as was done, for a brief moment, by the “vanishing mediators” in the passage from socialism into capitalism’ (Žižek 2007b: 28).
There has been much dissatisfaction with this supposed ‘democracy’ in Eastern Europe, but this dissatisfaction is not unique to the former Soviet or ex-Yugoslav new nation states. As we write now, for example, the 2012–13 Slovenian protests are an ongoing series of protests against the Slovenian political class, including the mayor Franc Kangler and the leaders of government, some of whom have been officially accused of corruption. In his recent text The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (Žižek 2012b), Žižek explores these movements of protest on a more international level, focusing on the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement. Again, for Žižek, what is at stake here is a ‘critique of ideology’, the notion of ideological mystification remaining as pertinent as ever. We have seen Žižek trace this important thematic through his work from the 1980s, with the critiques in Problemi and The Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek 1989) and the respective versions, for example, of Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (Žižek 1992a, 2002, 2008a). We have also discussed how important, for both Dolar and Žižek, the NSK and Laibach have been in developing a critique of ideology through music and art, which avoids overt critique of content and instead demonstrates how the frame of ideology constitutes itself. As Žižek puts it, in a Freudian phrase, ‘they moved the underground’. We have seen Dolar’s acute analysis of Lacanianism (and its complex ‘theory of development’ [Dolar 1998]), and similarly, his localization of the problematic simultaneously in the Slovenian context. Here, his essay for Mladina, ‘The Unconscious is Structured as Yugoslavia’ (Dolar 1989), as well as his connections between, for example, certain reifying uses of the ‘voice’ and the Milošević ascent to power (Dolar 2006), are significant examples. In the case of Zupančič, we have seen her significant stress on the strictures of the ‘symbolic’, the ‘yes, but does the chicken know about my not being a seed any more?’ predicament of her psychoanalytical joke (Zupančič 2008a). Zupančič, with all her emphasis on the subversive potential of ‘comedy’, also demonstrates the strong political commitment of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. From a Lacanian perspective, we see here the important reference to the notion of the ‘Real’, which Lacan foregrounds in his Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1994). Although often misunderstood by opponents of Lacan as precisely an example of esoteric idealism, this concept (understood as the trauma or the ‘fissure’ in the symbolic [Žižek and Daly 2003]) becomes the lever for philosophical and political intervention in the symbolic sphere.
Here, however, it is not just an inheritance of Lacan and Kant (Zupančič 2000) but also of Marx. Zupančič’s most recent text Why Psychoanalysis?: Three Interventions, demonstrates this political commitment clearly, and of course, here we also see the dovetailing of psychoanalysis and philosophy, psychoanalysis as a kind of acutely engaged political thought and activism. But where to from here? How might we map out the future directions of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis? In the next sections, I want to explore some of these possibilities, beginning with some suggestions from one of Žižek’s most recent texts, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Žižek 2012a).
Lacan ‘On a Warpath from the Beginning’
In the aforementioned obituary of Lacan, Badiou delineates some of the most searching aspects of Lacan’s philosophy which will come to have such an influence both on Badiou’s own work and on the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis (Badiou 2009). The analysis here is helpful in contextualizing some of the most recent developments in the Lacanian analysis of Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič. Badiou starts by focusing on the full frontal assault of Lacan’s thought, often missed by commentators: ‘it is a fact that Lacan was on the warpath right from the start, denouncing the illusory consistency of the ego, rejecting the American psychoanalysis of the 1950s which proposed to “reinforce the ego” and thereby adapt people to the social consensus’ (Badiou 2009: 1). Badiou captures here Lacan’s own militancy and also the radicalizing sociopolitical import of his work ‘right from the start’. This radicalism was to have its implications for Lacan, who Badiou describes as having been ‘excommunicated’ from the psychoanalytical establishment. Tellingly, the first chapter of Lacan’s Seminar XI, on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1994), is entitled precisely ‘Excommunication’. Alongside this militancy comes a certain ‘bleakness’ in the philosophical vision: ‘desire has no substance and no nature; it has only a truth; his particularly bleak vision of psychoanalysis in which it is the truth and not happiness which is in play . . . the severe position he promoted to the end’ (Badiou 2009: 2). But one of the great paradoxes of that ‘particularly bleak vision’ is that it has had such a powerful impact on militant (and progressive) politics in the last 40 years. We have seen in the analysis of the Slovenian context that it was specifically Lacan who came to exert the greatest influence as the ‘lever’ which could engender theoretical and political transformation under state socialism. Faced with what Močnik describes as this ‘impasse’ (Močnik 1993), the Lacanian perspective allowed for movement. In the case of Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič, this came through philosophical works of cultural and psychic critical analysis. In the case of the NSK, it came through music, theatre and art, but they too (in a Freudian–Lacanian mode) ‘moved the underground’.
What Badiou highlights here as important in Lacan’s later work also has resonance with the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. He states that ‘It has become good form to state that the ageing Lacan was no longer transmitting anything worthwhile from the 1970s onwards; in my view it is quite the opposite’ (Badiou 2009: 2). This later Lacanianism, famously difficult and esoteric, is also as we have seen the major focal point of the work of Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič. Although we have seen Dolar’s meta-level analysis to move away from simple chronological linearity (Dolar 1998), positing a movement to and fro between phases, nonetheless the key concepts of all three thinkers are rooted in Lacan’s later more radical thinking and conceptuality. Certainly, this later thought can then be employed to reinterpret some of the earlier work in a more radical light. One example here is in terms of the supposed move from the earlier concept of desire to the later concept of drive (Žižek et al. 2014; Zupančič et al. 2014). While it is undoubtedly true that Lacan instigates what Dolar refers to as a ‘demotion of desire’ (Dolar 2006) in his later work, nonetheless the more radical invocation of ‘drive’ is not a simple advocation of ‘death drive’ as some commentators might suggest (Bersani 2002). Bersani’s preface to Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents, then, while we might say it is polemically effective in presenting Freudian–Lacanianism as a virulent nihilism, is nonetheless badly one-sided. The later emphasis on ‘drive’ also takes account of the enigmatic quality of drive (e.g., its ‘partial’ aspect) and its complicity with desire, the possibility of sublimation of drive, and so on. It seems no coincidence that when Lacan tries best to explicate the notion of ‘drive’ (for example in Seminar XI), that the two sources he refers to are Heraclitus and the surrealists (Lacan 1994: 168): ‘“la pulsion fait le tour”; the drive moves around the object . . . the drive tricks the object . . . the montage of the drive is a montage which first is presented as having neither head nor tail – in the sense in which one speaks of montage in a surrealist collage’ (Lacan 1994: 168–9). Lacan struggles to develop an image worthy of this surrealism of the drive, and eventually seems to opt for an image developed from one of the darkest but also most comical surrealists, Lautréamont: ‘I think that the resulting image would show the working of a dynamo connected up to a gas tap; a peacock’s feather emerges and tickles the belly of a pretty woman who is just lying there, looking beautiful’ (Lacan 1994: 169). This image of the drive seems a long way from Bersani’s dominance of the primordial aggressive drives. Instead, it would seem (as Freud himself suggests in the last lines of Civilisation and Its Discontents) that Eros must also have its say.
In his final analysis of Lacan, Badiou profers a scathing critique of contemporary academic culture and academic philosophy, in its absolute failure to connect with political and cultural life. This seems difficult to refute. How many philosophers in philosophy departments, for example, produce work that is read by non-professional philosophers? Unfortunately, the answer is shockingly few and while there can be valid justifications for philosophical work done on its own terms, often the lack of any connectivity with anything outside the academic culture betokens a sterility and a complacency. Ironically, Lacan is often lambasted in philosophy departments for the supposed ‘esotericism’ of his approach to thinking. Badiou describes this academic or professional philosophical malaise as a ‘trite situation . . . marked by the platitudes and relative self-abasement of our intellectuals’ (Badiou 2009: 5). But he also marks the affirmative Lacanian alternative, with Lacan’s work having a significant influence on ‘Marxism in crisis’ as well as developing a ‘highly unusual ethics . . . the almost incalculable import of that ethics’, to which we should, Badiou suggests, ‘pay tribute’ (Badiou 2009: 5).
Badiou’s approach to Lacan has much in common with the approach of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. In his recent text, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Žižek 2012a), Žižek takes up several of the issues foregrounded by Badiou and again, we can see how these thematics are significant for the troika as a whole. We can also relate them back to Dolar and Zupančič’s most recent work.
The deadlocks of Lacanianism
The notion of an orthodox Lacanianism has been complexified, for example, through our interviews with the Ljubljana troika (Dolar et al. 2014), as less a sterile literalism and more of a transformative rereading. This is in keeping with the sense that Lacan’s own philosophy is hardly a closed system in itself. In the significant debates between Derrida and Lacan, for example, Derrida foregrounds a certain pathos for truth in Lacan’s work (‘the truth of truth’). Nonetheless, Derrida also foregrounds the irreducibly enigmatic quality of Lacan’s philosophy. Derrida observes that ‘The general question of the text is at work unceasingly in his writings where the logic of the signifier disrupts naive semanticism and Lacan’s style was constructed so as to check permanently any access to an isolatable content, to an unequivocal, determinable meaning beyond writing’ (Derrida 1988: 176). Lacan had also spoken of this enigma in relation to his own reinterpretation of Freud. If Lacan was a Freudian, he was one who could see that the Freudian system was open-ended. As Hurst notes, comparing Derrida and Lacan’s approaches here, ‘Lacanian psychoanalysis is an inventive appropriation that in much the same spirit as Derrida’s deconstructive reading, uncovers the auto-deconstructing tensions in Freud’s text as a warrant for his radicalisations’ (Hurst 2008: 207).
It is in this spirit of reinvention and radicalization that we can then best understand the approach of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. Močnik describes the ‘breakthrough’ which Lacanianism performed in Slovenia, but there remain significant ‘deadlocks’ also in the Lacanian approach. In Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Žižek 2012a), Žižek takes up some of these issues so as to point to a future direction for the work of the troika. ‘Over the last decade, the theoretical work of the party troika to which I belong (along with Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupančič) had the axis of Hegel–Lacan as its “undeconstructible” point of reference. Whatever we were doing, the underlying axiom was that reading Hegel through Lacan (and vice versa) was our unsurpassable horizon’ (Žižek 2012a: 18). But now Žižek notes a change, a sense of limitation in the theoretical analyses and what they are capable of, first in relation to Hegel. ‘Recently, however, limitations of this horizon have appeared. With Hegel, his ability to think pure repetition and to render thematic the singularity of what Lacan called the object a’ (Žižek 2012a: 18). As we have seen, the reading of Hegel in the Ljubljana group already goes against a more dominant reading of Hegel as a thinker of ‘synthesis’, the thinker whom, for example, Bataille and Derrida castigate for his ‘terror of nonmeaning’ (Derrida 1972), his apparent inability to recognize the limits of epistemology. In contrast, the Ljubljana group read Hegel as a thinker (who perhaps more than any other) allows for the encounter with ‘nonmeaning’ or the extra-symbolic experience of what Lacan calls the ‘Real’ (Lacan 1994). But here, Žižek seems to be calling that Hegelian resource into question and precisely in terms of the latter’s inability to ‘render thematic the singularity of the object a’, this ‘object a’ being another Lacanian term for the ‘Real’, the absence of an ontological closure (Zupančič 2008b).
Similarly, limitations are described by Žižek in terms of Lacan’s own approach: ‘With Lacan the fact that his work ended in an inconsistent opening. Seminar XX [Encore] stands for his ultimate achievement and deadlock . . . in the years after, he desperately concocted different ways out (the sinthome; knots etc) all of which failed; so where do we stand now?’ (Žižek 2012a: 18). The appearance of Kierkegaard, one of Hegel’s most vehement critics, as a significant thinker in this new text by Žižek, points towards a different direction in terms of the thematics of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. Here, while there are internalist critiques going on, there is also the example of criticism from other aspects of philosophy towards Lacan and psychoanalysis. We will see this in detail below in terms of the philosophical approach of Catherine Malabou (2012) more influenced by Derrida, but also by revolutionary developments in the philosophy of mind and contemporary neuroscience. We will see how, for Malabou, such developments show clearly the limits of some of the Freudian–Lacanian approaches to the ‘unconscious’ and their relation to ‘trauma’. At issue here, also, is the very epistemological status of psychoanalysis, that is, the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy as such. We have seen that this has also been a key issue for Dolar and Zupančič (Zupančič 2008b). At issue then in the Malabou–Žižek encounter is not simply the specific debate but also its implications for how we see the future work of the troika of thinkers more generally.
‘The New Wounded’ – Žižek for and against Malabou
In Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Žižek 2012a), Žižek takes up the challenge of psychoanalysis from within the ambit of the troika, the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. As we have seen, he is keen there to point to new directions in the relation between Hegel and Lacan. However, the challenge to Lacanianism also comes from outside its parameters, from critiques which call into question its very terms of reference. One such recent encounter between the Ljubljana mode of psychoanalysis and an alternative approach (which still shows significant affinities on both sides) is the debate between Catherine Malabou and Žižek. Žižek foregrounds his debate with Catherine Malabou in relation to the distinction or the conflict between what he terms, following Malabou, the ‘Freudian unconscious’ and the ‘cerebral unconscious’ (Žižek 2010). But the specifics of this debate are significantly contextualized by several more meta-level problematics, whether these are, for example, the theoretical relations between Lacan and Derrida, or more generally the affinities or otherwise of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Indeed, one can go further and argue that at issue in the microcosmic critique of Malabou in Living In The End Times is the very definition or understanding of what constitutes philosophy itself, or to use a recent Žižekian phrase, what constitutes ‘philosophy in the present’ (Badiou and Žižek 2009). While there are significant tensions elaborated in the Žižekian reading of Malabou’s text The New Wounded (Malabou 2012), what is perhaps more striking is the level of agreement between the two philosophers exemplified in the discussion. Again, we can say that this has implications significantly beyond the Žižek/Malabou debate itself, in relation to the future understanding of the boundaries between psychoanalysis and deconstruction, bringing into relief, for example, the underestimated affinities which exist in relation to the two latter disciplines, an argument which Andrea Hurst has recently defended strongly (Hurst 2008). The significant question for our purposes, then, is how this future relationship between psychoanalysis and deconstruction might have significance for the work of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis as a whole.
In Living in the End Times (Žižek 2010), Žižek addresses the specifics of Malabou’s reading of the brain and mind relation in The New Wounded (Malabou 2012), while also exploring some of the meta-issues at stake in the disagreements between deconstruction and psychoanalysis. Additionally at issue here, as Žižek makes clear, is the very status of philosophy as a discipline in its own right. This perennial question of philosophy, in effect, ‘what is philosophy?’ and its related question, ‘what is psychoanalysis?’ (or as Zupančič puts it ‘why psychoanalysis?’) has been a paradigmatic theme for the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis as a whole (Dolar 1998, 2006; Zupančič 2008b).
It draws on the very same epistemological issues which preoccupied Lacan and Derrida, in their original theoretical conflicts (Hurst 2008). Žižek thematizes Malabou’s contribution to the discussion in terms of a conflict between ‘the Freudian unconscious versus the cerebral unconscious’ (Žižek 2010: 291). At issue is the complex question of ‘abstract violence’ and its effects on what Žižek refers to as ‘the reality of human lives’ (Žižek 2010: 291). This problematic for Žižek is at the heart of Malabou’s concerns in The New Wounded, specifically as it relates to the ‘psychological consequences of this rise in new forms of “abstract” violence”’ (Žižek 2010: 292).
Central for Žižek, in this context, is nothing less than the question of the very priority or hierarchy of concepts in psychoanalysis, with regard to the valuation of the concept of the ‘unconscious’ vis-à-vis the concept of ‘trauma’. Žižek elaborates the original Freudian priority as being given to the concept of the ‘unconscious’ which he explicates as an ‘unknown known’ on Freudian terms, or in the Lacanian phrase, ‘there is a knowledge that is not known, knowledge that is based on the signifier as such’ (Žižek 2010: 292). However, we must distinguish this from the lesser-valued notion of ‘trauma’ in Freud, which is designated as an ‘unknown unknown’; ‘the violent intrusion of something radically unexpected, something the subject was absolutely not ready for; and which it cannot integrate in any way’ (Žižek 2010: 292). Not the least interesting question here is to what extent can the original Freudian priority given to the concept of the ‘unconscious’ over ‘trauma’ be seen as being faithfully maintained by Lacan, or indeed by Žižek?
But, at this juncture, this meta-level issue is not Žižek’s primary concern. He is rather interested in the exact direction of Malabou’s own critique of psychoanalysis, or what he refers to as her ‘critical reformulation of psychoanalysis’ (Žižek 2010: 292). Malabou’s critique here has implications for Žižek, Dolar and Zupančič. The priority given to the concept of ‘unconscious’ in Freud, for Žižek, amounts to a valuation of the ‘inner’ over the ‘outer’ (or the ‘internal’ over the ‘external’). This valuation and hierarchy is fundamental to the very epistemology which underlies psychoanalysis. Outer shocks or events with a traumatic impact on the self derive their meaning not in and from themselves, but from their relation to a prioritized inner psychic life. This, according to Žižek, is a priority which is shared by both Freud and Lacan: ‘for Freud and Lacan, external shocks, unexpected brutal encounters or intrusions owe their properly traumatic impact to the way they touch on a pre-existing traumatic “psychic reality”’ (Žižek 2010: 292).
On Malabou’s terms, there has been an intensification of the outer shocks in our contemporary society, notwithstanding the fact that these latter traumas ‘have of course been known for centuries’ (Žižek 2010: 292). This intensification leads to a need for a deconstruction of psychoanalytical categories, especially in the context of an era which can be described as post-religious or ‘disenchanted’, with the attendant effects in terms of metaphysical frameworks of meaning: ‘since we live in a disenchanted, post-religious era, they are much more likely to be directly experienced as meaningless intrusions of the real’ (Žižek 2010: 292). This latter phrase is especially important in this context: ‘meaningless intrusions of the real’. On Malabou’s terms, at issue is a supposed misunderstanding of the latter emptiness of meaning, which Freud and psychoanalysis (including, it would seem, Lacan’s evolution of the latter), on her terms, misdiagnose. These events are ‘brutal but meaningless’ and they ‘destroy’, on Malabou’s interpretation, rather than simply reform the ‘symbolic texture of the subject’s identity’ (Žižek 2010: 292). This represents the key node of disagreement between Malabou and Freudian–Lacanianism (assuming, as she does, the unity of the latter theoretical designation). That is, there is disagreement over the exact status of such external shocks to the psyche and the level of their destructiveness with regard to symbolic meaning and the status of the subject per se.
What focuses Žižek’s attention, in the first instance, is how this description of meaningless events by Malabou constitutes a fundamental challenge to the very self-understanding of psychoanalysis. Žižek reads Malabou’s work as calling for a complete ‘critical reformulation’ of the very premises of psychoanalysis as a science. This constitutes, on Žižek’s terms, her ‘basic reproach to Freud’ (Žižek 2010: 293), and indeed, it would seem, an equally strong reproach to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Understood in this manner, this would also constitute a fundamental disagreement between Malabou and Žižek, which we might then broaden out to involve a whole disagreement between psychoanalysis and deconstruction as such. As Žižek notes, ‘Malabou’s basic reproach to Freud is that when confronted with such cases, he succumbs to the temptation to look for meaning. He is not ready to accept the direct destructive power of external shocks; they can destroy the psyche of the victim (or at least wound it in an irremediable way) without resonating with any inner traumatic truth’ (Žižek 2010: 293). Žižek reinforces his point here with reference to the example of the ‘muselmann’, the supposedly resigned and defeated-in-advance concentration camp victim, simply waiting around to die with no fight left. If the ‘muselmann’ can be said to constitute some kind of human condition, shared by ‘victims of multiple rape, torture and so on’ (Žižek 2010: 293), this condition again can be said, on Malabou’s terms, to transgress the epistemological boundaries of psychoanalytical thought. The ‘muselmann’ condition is misunderstood on the Freudian terms of the unconscious: ‘[the muselmann] is not devastated by unconscious anxieties, but by a “meaningless” external shock which can in no way be hermeneutically appropriated or integrated’ (Žižek 2010: 293).
Žižek is alert to the ramifications of this Malabouian intervention for the very status of Freudian (and indeed Lacanian) psychoanalysis. Malabou reads her own work as pointing towards the possibility of a ‘new self’ as opposed to the old, psychoanalytical self: ‘The brain in no way anticipates the possibility of its own damage. When this damage occurs, it is another self which is affected, a “new” self founded in misrecognition. What Freud cannot envisage is that the victim, as it were, survives its own death; . . . a new subject emerges which survives its own death, the death or erasure of its own symbolic identity’ (quoted Žižek 2010: 293–4). It is clear, on these terms, that Malabou is offering a strong critique of Freudian–Lacanian psychoanalysis, or on Žižek’s terms, ‘a critical reformulation’. Žižek’s own analysis follows that of Malabou quite carefully and, at times, he appears to be wholly in agreement with her analysis. For example, he describes the move from a ‘Freudian twentieth century’ to a ‘twenty first century . . . of the post-traumatic disengaged subject’ (Žižek 2010: 295) where ‘today, the enemy is hermeneutics; all hermeneutics is impossible’ (Žižek 2010: 295). Read in this way, Žižek would seem to be interpreting Malabou’s critique of psychoanalysis as persuasive.
But, while admitting the persuasiveness of some aspects of Malabou’s critique at a micro-level, crucially Žižek still seeks to defend the more meta-level Freudian–Lacanian framework, as a framework with some limitations but one still capable of addressing philosophically the plight of such a ‘twenty first century . . . of the post-traumatic disengaged subject’ (Žižek 2010: 295). The works of Zupančič and Dolar would also stand as crucial in this debate.
Conclusion – Enjoy your future!
In 1989, Laclau (in his preface to Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology) indicated the arrival of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis as an entity in translation as a key moment, due to this being a group of theoreticians whose ‘original features’ were indispensable to a critique of ideology in the West, which had come up against something of an impasse (Laclau 1989). In this book, we have traced the extraordinary evolution of this group of thinkers since 1989, while also looking back to the complex (and often neglected) genealogy of the pre-1989 narrative which created the context for this group’s existence and its very urgency. As we have seen, in Living in the End Times (Žižek 2010), we find Žižek (both for and against Malabou’s subtle critique) continuing to defend the relevance of this group’s Freudian–Lacanian analysis, more than 20 years after Laclau’s preface (Laclau 1989). In the later text, as well as in his more recent (and monumental) Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Žižek 2012a), we have seen Žižek seek to resituate the work of the Ljubljana troika.
This resituation of concepts and themes is nothing new in the context of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. One of the advantages of the longer-term genealogical view of the group that we have taken is that it allows us to pinpoint key moments of transition or transformation. As Dolar noted in the interview, ‘orthodoxy is transformation’ (Dolar et al. 2014). We have thus witnessed significant shifts in emphasis across the development of the group. First, the space allowed for critique in former Yugoslavia was still subject to what Gantar referred to as the ‘colonisation of the life world’ (Gantar 1993). Thus, the emergence of a genuinely alternative (Slovene) culture in the shape successively of punk, FV and the NSK (Motoh 2012) allowed for new concepts and emphases to emerge, from the original symptom to the symptom as a critique of the state system itself. Here, we saw a growing sophistication in the critique of ideology, whether through the analysis of Lacan and Hegel in works such as The Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek 1989) and A Voice and Nothing More (Dolar 2006) or in the complex works of the NSK, Laibach and IRWIN (Žižek 2007c). This also allowed us to see the specific contextual element at work here, what Dolar brilliantly referred to as ‘Yugoslavia is structured as the Unconscious’ (Dolar 1989). We have seen Žižek’s view of the critique of ideology change significantly through the various texts we have explored, for example paradigmatically in the various editions of Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (Žižek 1992a, 2001a, 2008b). Zupančič, as the former student of Dolar and Žižek, has also brought something powerfully original to bear on the recent problematics of the group. Her first monograph Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (Zupančič 2000) foregrounded the crucial seminar of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992) while also demonstrating how the notion of ‘ethics’ remained a key feature of Lacan’s later work, although undergoing transformation there, ‘from desire to drive’ (Zupančič 2000). Her later work has brilliantly sought a reconciliation between these two terms, desire and drive, with especial emphasis on the concepts of ‘love’ (reinvoking the connections between psychoanalysis and Plato) and ‘comedy’ (reintroducing the importance of Aristophanes, among others) (Zupančič 2008a). In all of this, it is also clear that the relation between psychoanalysis and philosophy is crucial. For the Ljubljana troika, psychoanalysis at its best is a form of philosophy, understood as an acute critique of the psyche and of politics.
In his recent texts, we have seen Žižek introduce the thematic of future directions, suggesting certain limitations in the philosophies of Lacan and Hegel. But (for and) against Malabou’s powerful critique of the inadequacy of psychoanalysis to deal with contemporary ‘nonmeaning’, Žižek has argued eloquently that sensitivity to the limits of meaning and epistemological truth are precisely central to contemporary psychoanalysis, as it continues to reinvent Freud and Lacan for ‘philosophy in the present’, and philosophy in the future. Here, no radical rereading of the psychoanalytical tradition would be required but simply attention to the detail of Lacan’s own texts on truth, where Lacan at his own most radical moment avers his very lineage with Freud: ‘A hole in truth: it is the negative aspect that appears in anything to do with the sexual, namely its inability to aver. That is what a psychoanalysis is all about. We can feel that what Freud called “sexuality” takes on a new meaning from the very beginning’ (Lacan 2008: 22). For Žižek, then, the very radicality and contemporaneity of Malabou’s philosophical intervention in The New Wounded (Malabou 2012) would lead all the way back not simply to Lacan, but to Freud.1 As Lacan notes, ‘Freud’s terms come back to life, take on a different import’ (Lacan 2008: 23). And this rebirth of Freudianism and psychoanalysis would paradoxically, and somewhat against Malabou’s active reading, be there ‘from the very beginning’ (Lacan 2008: 22).