Institute of Philosophy

This essay proposes a reading of psychoanalytic development through crisis. It will be argued that various crisis within and outside of the psychoanalytic field had a determining and constituting role in theoretical and clinical development. The disavowed historical antagonisms that are inherent to psychoanalysis and helped advance psychoanalytic theory, equally created further schisms, perpetuating dialectic of resistance-criticism-revision that maintains the radical potential of the theory and at the same time the destructive other side. The non-relation between particular theories of psychoanalysis and philosophy will be placed in the context of the dialectic that fosters this antagonistic relation, formulating new views and theoretical postulates and equally, the potential for destruction of the radical idea.

In this article, we discuss Badiou’s concept of the world through the somewhat unusual metaphor of “the anatomy of the world”. The anatomy of the world allows us to approach the concept of the world through the idea of ​​its constitution, architecture, structure – its anatomy. But as we show in the first part of the text, in order to derive the anatomy of the world, we need a corpse of the world – the world must die. Following the philosophy of Alain Badiou, we demonstrate that the world in its objective existence is indifferent to the question of life and death. Whether the world lives or dies depends only on the realisation of the truth procedures in the world on the basis of which the world is subjectivised. The world suffers from mortifying impulses, as the reactive and obscure forms of subjectivity actively work against the realisation of truths in the world. Through the artistic presentations of anatomy by Rembrandt van Rijn and John Donne, we also elaborate the tense relation...

This paper is based on the outcomes of the interdisciplinary project Coal Story conducted by the Faculty of Media and the Faculty of Design in Ljubljana (Slovenia), which was implemented in 2019 in cooperation with the graduate and postgraduate students of Media, Communication, Psychology, and Design, who were working under the mentorship of interdisciplinary researchers and designers. The central designer of the project was Marjeta Hribar with her innovative brand KUOLMi ; she is known for her jewelry and object design made of coal found in her local Zasavje region, which has a rich history of industrial coal mining in Slovenia. Design as a form of visual arts is an important social formation with a potential for restructuring the attitude and strategies that we have towards the material culture around us. In this paper, we try to contextualize the findings of the project using two theoretical approaches: firstly, we use the study of signs, semiology, and secondly, the current stud...

This article discusses the philosophy of Alain Badiou from the perspective of a formulation that we believe represents it succinctly: the dialectic of formalization. The main thesis of the article is that Badiou’s doctrine of the four truth procedures (politics, science, love, and art) can be understood as a doctrine of a dialectical realization of new and universal forms in the world. The dialectic of formalization announces a double procedure – an autonomous and creative procedure for the production of a new true form in the world and a process of the formation of continuity in discontinuity. Moreover, the dialectic of formalization represents a connection between Badiou’s mature work and his early writings from the late 1960s. Even though in the 1960s and 1970s Badiou had not yet introduced the concepts of subject and truth in the sense that he understands them today, it is possible to support the thesis that there is an indisputable connection between Badiou’s early concept of f...

In the present article, we have demonstrated that it is important to understand the equating of mathematics with ontology in Badiou’s philosophy, taking into account the necessary connection between rational materialism and ontological realism. Only in this way can we truly understand Badiou’s fundamental thesis that thinking and being are the same. Philosophy is not ontology and it is not a true procedure, but a thought that arises by being conditioned with the generic thoughts of all four truth procedures (art, politics, science, and love), which in turn does not mean that it cannot speak in the name of truth and ontology.