• Mladen Dolar at Summer School as School 2018
Mladen Dolar: What, If Anything, is Modernism?

Mladen Dolar at Summer School as School 2018
July 16, 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 Summer School as School 2018 Public Program with the lecture “What, if anything, is modernism?” by Mladen Dolar.

What are we talking about when we talk about modernism? The lecture will try to establish a larger picture and framework for the understanding of the modernist project and propose some conceptual clues. I will take as a starting point the year 1913, which seems like an incredible concentration of the modernism’s onset: Malevich, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Schönberg, Stravinsky, Apollinaire, Pound, Rilke, Gide, Proust, Joyce, Pessoa, Kafka, Freud … have all written, published, exhibited, performed some of their key works during that same year. This coincidence calls for a reflection about what these different authors and works have conceptually in common. Three concepts will be proposed and discussed: creaturely life, minimal difference and the wake-up call. The special role played by psychoanalysis in this context will be highlighted and scrutinized.

The question of the onset calls for the mirror question of the demise of modernism. It will be addressed through the figure of Samuel Beckett, the greatest master of minimal difference and conceptual minimalism. The demise of modernism necessarily entails the further question of what comes after: if modernism is based on a concept, what could be the concept subtending the postmodernism? Irony, remake, simulacrum?

Mladen Dolar is Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. His principal areas of research are psychoanalysis, modern French philosophy, German idealism and art theory. He has lectured extensively at the universities in USA and across Europe, he is the author of over hundred and fifty papers in scholarly journals and collective volumes. Apart from twelve books in Slovene his book publications include most notably A Voice and Nothing More (MIT 2006, translated into six languages) and Opera's Second Death (with Slavoj Žižek, Routledge 2001, also translated into several languages). His book on the voice has become the standard reference work in the expanding area of voice studies. His new book The Riskiest Moment is forthcoming with Duke University Press. He is one of the founders of the Ljubljana Lacanian School.