The Ljubljana School: Žižek, Dolar, Zupančič
Description
This seminar will focus on the enormous contribution to psychoanalytic theory and philosophy made by Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, and Alenka Zupančič, who together comprise what has come to be known as “the Ljubljana School.” Seminar members may engage with any number of concepts or topics that Žižek, Dolar, and Zupančič, whether individually or collectively, have helped to establish as central to various academic disciplines and discourses (psychoanalytic theory and philosophy especially) over the past few decades.
There is an excess of Žižekian topics from which to choose, of course, but in addition to his work on Hegel and Lacan more generally, some of those we favor include: ideology, ontology, ethics, politics, political theology (especially Christian atheism), and film/media theory. With regard to Dolar’s work, some prospective topics include: voice and gaze, interpellation, the uncanny/extimacy (especially in literature), cogito and the unconscious, and “rumors.” Zupančič’s most recent works—What IS Sex?, Let Them Rot, and Disavowal—are of particular interest to us, but participants may address her earlier work on the “ethics of the Real,” comedy, Nietzsche, and more. We are also open to papers that treat the Ljubljana School as a group.
In addition to celebrating and bringing into greater relief the academic contributions of Žižek, Dolar, and Zupančič, the seminar aims to build upon and further advance their work by way of rigorous engagement with it.
Seminar chairs: Frances Restuccia (Professor of English, Boston College) and Russell Sbriglia (Associate Professor of English, Seton Hall University)
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Kaitlyn Sorenson is Assistant Professor of Contemporary European Thought and Literature in the Department of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University (SUNY), where she also serves as Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH). Her research focuses on the intellectual history of critical theory in the former Yugoslavia.
Speaker Bio
Gregor Moder is a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. His works include Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (2017), co-edited volumes The Object of Comedy (2020), The Ethics of Ernst Lubitsch (2024) The Resilience of History (2024), and most recently a book on Antigone as Political Philosophy (in Slovenian and German; English edition forthcoming in 2026).
Speaker Bio
Clint Burnham teaches at Simon Fraser University. His Mari Ruti and Climate Change: From Grief to Action is forthcoming from Routledge in 2026.
Speaker Bio
Matthew Flisfeder is a Žižek scholar and Professor of Rhetoric & Communications at The University of Winnipeg. He is the author of The Hysterical Sublime: Humanism in the Age of Posthuman Capitalism (2025), Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media (2021), Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner (2017), and The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek's Theory of Film (2012). He is also the co-editor of Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader (2014).
Papers
Speaker Bio
English Professor at Boston College, Frances Restuccia teaches contemporary theory and modernism. She has authored James Joyce and the Law of the Father (Yale UP); Melancholics in Love; Amorous Acts: Lacanian Ethics in Modernism, Film, and Queer Theory (Stanford UP); The Blue Box: Kristevan/Lacanian Readings of Contemporary Film, and Agamben’s Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature and Art (Routledge). She has co-chaired Psychoanalytic Practices at Harvard for decades.
Speaker Bio
Russell Sbriglia is associate professor and director of graduate studies in English at Seton Hall University. His scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and edited collections, and he is the editor of the books Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism (Northwestern UP; with Slavoj Žižek) and Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek (Duke UP). He is currently completing a monograph titled A Gainful Loss: Melville avec Lacan.
Speaker Bio
Melanie is a PhD student in philosophy at Villanova University. She recently finished her undergraduate at Boston College, where she worked on philosophy, English, and French. Currently, her focus is on German idealism, psychoanalysis, and the first generation of the Frankfurt school.
Speaker Bio
Nam Do is a third-year PhD student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (CSLC) at University of Southern California. Their research examines the intersection between antiblack violence, aesthetic theory, and psychoanalysis in contemporary media.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Boštjan Nedoh is a Research Associate at the Institute of Philosophy ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana. He is the author of Ontology and Perversion: Deleuze, Agamben, Lacan (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019) and Eros tesnobe (The Eros of Anxiety, Analecta, 2023) and the coeditor of Lacan and Deleuze: A Disjunctive Synthesis (Edinburgh UP, 2017), Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism (Edinburgh UP, 2022), and Political Theology and Its Discontents (Bloomsbury, 2026).
Speaker Bio
Scott Krzych is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Colorado College. He publishes regularly on psychoanalytic theory, media, and politics, including his first book, Beyond Bias: Conservative Media, Documentary Form, and the Politics of Hysteria (OUP, 2021). His current project examines the formal dimensions of neoliberalism as evidenced in New York City films, emphasizing the transition from neurosis to mania in contemporary indie, NYC centric films (or, from Woody Allen to Greta Gerwig)
Speaker Bio
Katherine Everitt holds a PhD from the European Graduate School. Her thesis was titled, Hegel in Vertigo: An Ontology of Space. Her research focuses on the philosophy of science and technology, primarily through a reading of Badiou, Hegel, and Žižek.
Speaker Bio
Jake McDonald is a PhD student in English Literature at Simon Fraser University. His main research interests involve psychoanalysis, digital studies, and critical theory, with a specific focus on digital mediation. His proposed dissertation, “Valences of Mediation: Boredom in the Age of Immediacy”, builds off the work of his dissertation advisor, Clint Burnham, and Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy to offer a productive approach to reconceptualizing alienation and mediation in the digital age.