Alenka Zupančič at Summer School as School 2018
August 1, 2018, 19:00
Venue: Boxing Club

Summer School as School
July 16 – August 2, 2018

Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina is pleased to announce the presentation “The End of Laughter” by Alenka Zupančič, part of Summer School as School 2018 Public Program.

The talk will take as its starting point a masterpiece by Preston Sturges, Sullivan’s travels. This ingenuous screwball comedy represents a peek of the so called »old Hollywood«, and tackles the problem of if, and how, should art respond to the pressing (social) problems of its time (screwball comedy become popular during the Great depression). From this particular perspective the talk will propose some further ideas on the function, and on the functioning, of the »seriousness« in art, as well as in what is generally called “social critique”.

Alenka Zupančič is a Slovene philosopher and social theorist. She received her PhD from the University of Ljubljana and from Université Paris VIII. She works as research advisor at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences. She is also professor at the Graduate School ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana) and at the European Graduate School (Saas Fee). Together with Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Zupančič is one of the most prominent members of the "Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis." She is notable for her work on the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis, as well as for her original philosophical theory of comedy. She has published several books and over 150 articles. Her most recent work deals with the relationship between sexuality and ontology.

Some of her authored books include What is Sex? Cambridge (Ma) & London, The MIT Press 2017; The Odd One In: On Comedy, Cambridge (Ma) & London, The MIT Press 2008; Why Psychoanalysis: Three Interventions, Uppsala, NSU Press 2008; The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two, Cambridge (Ma) & London, The MIT Press 2003; and
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan, London & New York, Verso 2000, 2011.