Žižek and His Contemporaries by Irwin Jones;Motoh Helena;

Author:Irwin, Jones;Motoh, Helena; [Irwin, Jones;Motoh, Helena;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441153951
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2019-11-23T06:00:00+00:00

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

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