Pre-History of the Ljubljana School

Reflections on a discussion with Mladen Dolar

Today I am releasing a conversation with philosopher Mladen Dolar, a key member of the Ljubljana School, and one member of the “Party Troika”, with

Slavoj Žižek

and Alenka Zupančič. Philosophy Portal’s entire vision and project is forever indebted to the work of the Ljubljana School, and much of our drive is a fidelity to the truth they forward in philosophy for our time.¹

Mladen Dolar is a philosopher, cultural theorist, and film critic who has taught at the University of Ljubljana since 1982. His main fields of expertise are the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel and French structuralism. He has also written several books including A Voice and Nothing More, as well as his most recent work, Rumours.

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You can access the conversation here:

The core points from our discussion include:

1. Mladen Dolar started studying philosophy in 1969 and met Slavoj Žižek as an undergraduate in 1970. Since then they have been life-long friends, in discussion, writing and collaborating.

2. May 1968 in France was a defining event for their entire generation, a time of huge student movements, sexual revolution, war protest, musical and artistic innovation, and in general a mind opening era.

3. The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas) was growing, strong and alive during this moment, and a huge intellectual influence, both for Dolar and Žižek’s work at this time, as well as the larger student movements.

4. Structuralism in France was also a huge influence, with revolutionary books seemingly published every year, including Lacan’s Écrits (1966), Derrida’s On Grammatology (1967), Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970).

5. Dolar and Žižek’s State-Marxist professors, explicitly anti-Frankfurt School, and pro-Stalin, were baffled by French structuralism, and specifically opposed to Althusser’s anti-humanism.

6. Dolar, Žižek, and others in the 1970s were young theoreticians, meeting regularly, and trying to figure out how to make sense of French structuralism, and piece together a new narrative, coming to the view that Lacan’s story and work in particular was a key point or moment in the milieu.

7. According to Dolar, both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek were the key thinkers who were able to both show fidelity to French structuralism, while also transforming it, that is, attempting to articulate its philosophical story.

8. The Frankfurt School was also formative for what became the Ljubljana School in the sense of being convinced by their “Hegelian thesis”, that in order to return to Marx, we need to take Hegel seriously, reading Marx through the Hegelian legacy (opposed to Deleuze’s approach of “forgetting Hegel”).

9. At the same time, the Frankfurt School perceived Hegel as not going far enough, closing the negativity with Absolute Knowledge; here Adorno’s Negative Dialectics proposed a kind of negativity that would not be sublated, or not water down the negativity; but the Ljubljana School suggests that there are possibilities and moments in Hegel that exceed this too easy criticism.

10. This innovation allowed the Ljubljana School to connect Lacan’s flirtations with Hegel via Kojève more deeply to a critical reading of Hegel from the perspective of an “absolute negativity” betrayed in many 20th century interpretations of Hegel (Lacan’s Hegel as well as Lacan’s critiques of Hegel are through Kojève’s Hegel).

11. For the Ljubljana School Hegelian sublation does not mean that negativity has to be tamed or subdued, but rather that negativity is productive, a productive force underlying any positive process; thus there is the possibility of affirming negativity as the condition of possibility for thought.

12. Hegel’s logic is critically responding to Fichte’s “A=A”, Kant’s transcendental schematism, as well as Aristotelian identity, as modes that avoid seeing contradiction as the rule of truth and non-contradiction as itself false; and that Aristotle’s logic did not historically progress (remaining static/stagnant), only allowing for technical ameliorations, and alternative systematisations.

13. The Ljubljana School’s reclaiming of Hegelian negativity and logic, alongside Lacan’s psychoanalysis as signifying practice, allowed them to develop a new type of grand narrative that was an alternative to Lyotard’s end of the grand narrative which itself falls into the performative contradiction of being a “meta-narrative” of plurality and diversity for it’s own sake (following certain interpretations of Deleuzian multiplicity without signifying difference).

14. Hegel helps us construct the greatest grand narrative, from pure being-nothing to becoming, and then deriving for our historical time, the whole of philosophy of nature and spirit, as well as religion, art, and philosophy in the Absolute Idea; but also opening us to the Marxist notions of class struggle (which is why the Ljubljana School never gave up on Marx).

15. The Ljubljana School developed in a authoritarian socialist context, where Marxism was a generally accepted ideology, but the real threat to the authorities was not anti-Marxism, but rather philosophically richer forms of Marxism that developed in alternative directions (here Žižek’s MA thesis proved problematic).

16. Due to Žižek’s MA thesis proving problematic to the Marxist authorities he was unemployed for several years (around 1975); the problematic point was around the interpretations of French structuralism for Marxist politics that involved cultural production on the level of the symbolic, as opposed to straight forward or reductionist interpretations of “production of labour” and “real material forces”.

17. Žižek’s work introduced an idea, inspired by the original sources of Marx and Engels, that there were two forms of material practice, one related to goods and labour, and the other related to the production of the human (the family, kinship bonds, community, etc.); there were referred to originally as “material production” and “signifying practice”.

18. The idea of “signifying practice” for Marxism was developed through Lacan, as a way to read psychoanalysis as the theory of becoming human in relationship to the inhuman core; that psychoanalysis allowed Marxism to be humanist and non-humanist simultaneously (dealing with the human but not reducible to a humanist framework).

19. The Ljubljana School also started to find resources for the inhuman core of the human in texts from antiquity, whether in Socrates or Antigone or Christ, which all point towards an inhuman core of the human at the core of the whole project.

20. They also started to connect Hegelian negativity to Lacanian alienation, one as a precondition for thought, the other as a precondition for being; while at the same time recognising that in Lacan there is a move from alienation to separation which forces us to think the objet petit a (cause of desire).

21. At the same time this move into the later Lacan forced them to think about the limits of Hegel on the level of the objet petit a, and whether or not Hegel can think this object (Dolar and Žižek wrote a book about this in 1985, Hegel and the Object).

22. Žižek’s rise to international fame in 1989, through the Sublime Object of Ideology, seemed like a comet out of nowhere to the rest of the world, but it had been the result of 20 long years of collective study and work (1969-1989), where the Sublime Object of Ideology can be seen as a radical condensation of that work.

1. The coursework at Philosophy Portal aims to provide a real foundation for the primary source materials that have been core for the Ljubljana School. This year we also introduced a reading group focused on Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More and Zupančič’s The Odd One In, led by

Dimitri

Crooijmans. For more information, see: The Portal or the Slovenian School Reading Group.