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Sex, Ontology, Subjectivity: In Conversation with Alenka Zupancic
The Slovenian psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher Alenka Zupancic visited Toronto in April 2014 to give a talk on sexuality, ontology, and the unconscious. Along with Slavoj Zizek and Mladen Dolar, Zupancic has been at the forefront of a political wave of philosophically infused psychoanalytic theory based on the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Their work has had an impact in such diverse areas as ontology and materialism, ethics, ideological critique, film studies, and theories of the subject. In Ethics of the Real (2000), Zupancic uses Kant as the springboard to set out the coordinates of a Lacanian ethical theory that contrasts sharply with the ethical theory of Emmanuel Levinas and the relational ethics of Judith Butler. She has published on Nietzsche, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (2003), Hegel and comedy, The Odd One In: On Comedy (2008a), a short Lacanian treatise, Why Psychoanalysis: Three Interventions (2008b), and a number of incisive theoretical interventions in and around the work of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux (2004, 2011a). After her talk with Lacan Toronto1 (2014), she graciously took the time to sit down with Randall Terada for a conversation covering her most recent work.
Sexuality and Ontology
RT
I'd like to start off with the question you posed to your Toronto audience today: When Freud discovered sexuality, what did this imply? And what immediately came to mind for me were the famous lines of the judge in that pornography trial: "I don't know how to define it, but I know it when I see it." But this is not your answer at all. In fact, sexuality, if I understood you correctly, isn't a thing; it isn't any type of positivity. In addition to this, you mention the study by Ofra Shalev and Hanoch Yerushalmi (2009) in which there was registered a certain degree of resistance to broaching the subject of sexuality by therapists, due in part to a belief that sexuality was used as a cover or mask to disguise other, "deeper" issues. Also, in this study, two therapists interviewed are quoted as saying that sexual issues should be treated by sexologists and not by psychotherapists (p. 353). It makes me wonder...