The Slovenian School Reading Group

Starting 22nd of January at Philosophy Portal

Alenka Zupančič & Mladen Dolar

Starting on the 22nd of January, we will begin the Slovenian School Reading Group at Philosophy Portal.

For the first half of the year, we will dedicate one session each month to a chapter from Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More. After a break in the summer, we’ll continue with Alenka Zupančič’s The Odd One In.

Members of the Portal get free access to the Reading Group. If you are not a member, these are the ways to sign up:

1. Become a paid subscriber to my Patreon.

2. Become a paid subscriber to my Substack.

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Two Short Circuits

Both of these books are part of the Short Circuits Series edited by Slavoj Žižek. They contain the same Series Foreword in which Žižek starts off with the metaphor of a short circuit to describe what he takes to be critical reading.

The gist of short-circuiting is

“to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion), and read it in a short-circuiting way, through the lens of a “minor” author, text, or conceptual apparatus[.]”¹

When we read in a short-circuiting way we get insights that break with our unquestioned perceptions and uncover the fundamental linkage between dimensions that before, were taken to be disparate phenomena. Žižek gives the examples of Marx short-circuiting philosophy and religion with the domain of political economy and Nietzsche and Freud short-circuiting morality with libidinal economy.

What occurs in this short-circuiting disillusionment is not the reduction of a naive imagination to the cold hard reality underlying it, what Žižek calls ‘desublimation’. For example, it is not simply that theology is reduced to anthropology in Marx. Rather, Marx’s short-circuit reveals what is inherently disavowed in our perception as subjects in capitalism: even though we might be secular atheists, theology persists in our ideological activity, namely in political economy.² Short-circuiting reveals the way in which our immediate life-world is mediated by the unconscious.³

Žižek argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis is especially suited for such a short-circuiting approach to texts. As the editor of this series, Žižek says that each book achieves this basic criterion of short-circuiting:

“After reading a book in this series, the reader should not simply have learned something new: the point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another—disturbing—side of something he or she knew all the time.”⁴

This approach is part and parcel of philosophy that actively works with psychoanalysis. In these books we will not find treatises attempting to convince us of an ontological map that we can superimpose on our uncertain lives. What we will find is the confrontation with disturbance as this is what makes up the short-circuiting.

By this short-circuiting, one realizes that one has always lived with a certain knowledge that one did not know one had. That is what this type of critical reading lays bare. It’s in this sense that we can understand reading philosophy as psychoanalytical praxis with oneself. This time of course, with oneself and others in our group. As Mladen Dolar says: “thought is both a very solitary thing, but it is not enough. It is always a collective thing.”⁵ This is the spirit of Philosophy Portal that we take with us during our readings and discussions.

Taken metaphysically, we will get down to the nitty-gritty of causality. In the sense of Lacan’s proclamation that “[t]here is a cause only in something that doesn’t work.”⁶

In short, on the side of the object(-cause), we will study the voice with Dolar. On the side of the subject, we will study comic spirit with Zupančič. Here, I will shortly introduce you to the introductions of both books.

A Voice And Nothing More

Dolar starts his book by distinguishing three aspects of the voice. First, there is the voice that carries a message across, the medium conveying a meaning. Secondly, there is the aesthetic experience of the voice that distracts us from this message. The voice does not carry words that aim to signify, but is “the bearer of a meaning beyond any ordinary meanings.”⁷

And third, besides the voice as “vehicle of meaning” and the voice as “the source of aesthetic admiration,” there’s the third level. As Dolar explains:

“The aesthetic concentration on the voice loses the voice precisely by turning it into a fetish object; the aesthetic pleasure obfuscates the object voice, which I will try to pursue.”⁸

This third object voice is the blind spot in the conveyance of meaning in the first type, and the disturbance of the aesthetic pleasure in the second type.

To clarify this object voice, Dolar turns to the speech-machine from the 19th century. It looks like this:

Kempelen’scher Sprechapparat

This machine could make uncanny human-like sounds. It could reproduce what sounded like a voice speaking Latin and French words and phrases. Nowadays, we’re constantly surrounded by uncanny robot-like voices, like in public transport. Back in the day, this device with its very nonhuman look fascinated its audience for its familiar yet utterly estranging humanoid voice. With its voice, this mechanical machine seemed to cage an inner soul. Even though we know it is simply a mechanism, the object voice seems to be imbued with some form of a life of its own, as if its effect surpasses the explicable causes. This alien ‘more’ to the voice is the object that Dolar focuses on in the book.

The Odd One in

Comedy is no joke, especially as a philosophical research topic. Zupančič starts the introduction by saying that

“[i]t may come as little surprise to say that comedy is an extremely difficult subject of investigation—not only because of the multiplicity of various techniques and procedures involved in its process, but also because this process is in constant motion.”⁹

The constant movement of comedy makes it tough to pin down. Any definition of comedy is itself subject to comical treatment. Were this not to be the case, it would fall flat as a suitable definition. But it is the case. Any definition of comedy is going to be stretched out, cut apart, turned upside down and inside out. In other words, the definition seems itself to fall apart except for the fact that this comical motion is given:

“[T]he argument of this book is that comic subjectivity proper does not reside in the subject making the comedy, nor in the subjects or egos that appear in it, but in this very incessant and irresistible, all-consuming movement. Comic subjectivity is the very movement of comedy. However, movement is not the whole story of comedy. Stumbling, interruptions, punctuations, discontinuities, all kinds of fixations and passionate attachments are the other side of this same movement, and constitute a—not exactly objective but, rather, object-related—facet of comedy. It is with the scissors of this double perspective that this essay ventures to conceptualize the phenomenon of comedy and of the comical.”¹⁰

The constant motion of comedy comes to a halt. And urges it to keep on moving again. This theory on comedy’s ‘double perspective’ is deeply influenced by Hegel’s theory of comedy, which I’ve written about here.

From there on out, the crucial political distinction Zupančič makes regarding comedy is between its ideological and subversive forms.

Comedy and laughter allow us to take distance from what is happening to us. To shake something awkward and unpleasant off ourselves. This is the form of comedy that Zupančič critiques for being ideological. In laughter, the pressure of ideology finds its relief valve. After this release the pressure of ideology builds up again until its next release, making it bearable enough for us. In that liberating feeling of laughter, we get the breathing space to go back and hold our nose in the pressure of ideology. Ultimately, this type of laughter keeps our need to step outside of the bounds of ideology at bay. In our taking distance from it with comedy, we are all the more caught up in what we are supposedly taking a distance from. But that is not all there is according to Zupančič.

“If a truly subversive edge of comedy exists—as I believe it does—it is to be sought elsewhere.”¹¹

Today, the most blatant form of ideology is in the guise of being distant to ideologies and naturalizing some immediate felt perception of reality. As Zupančič puts it:

“Our present socioeconomic reality is increasingly being presented as an immediate natural fact, or fact of nature, and thus a fact to which we can only try to adapt as successfully as possible.”¹²

Good comedy subverts exactly this naturalization, or ‘sober’ and ‘direct’ sense of reality. Good comedy, she argues, is not the compulsive entertainment that is so common on social media, but unearths the innumerable discrepancies and antagonisms in phenomena that are taken to be natural. Good comedy makes us attentive to the inevitability of any seamless dynamic to be interrupted — short-circuited — and linked to motion of a different order. An inappropriate example from a Dutch joke: what do you do when your mother in law is limping through the garden? Shoot one more time.

This joke might rub one the wrong way, which goes to show comedy’s nonaffinity with feelings. It introduces a distance or ‘nonimmediacy’ in them. Here, Zupančič cites Horace Walpole:

“This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.”¹³

In today’s context, doom-scrolling obviously gets at the tragic mode of subjectivity that is forever at a distance to the natural flow of things (the feed), yet always trying to be submerged in it.

It begs the question what in this digital universe can be comical without being an ideological relief valve.

For Zupančič, compulsive entertainment, the promotion of happiness and the reliance on the immediacy of our feelings that naturalize of sociosymbolic relationships are all hostile to the comic spirit. In the book Zupančič doesn’t only attempt to think comedy for the sake of comedy, but also because she deems this to be crucial for philosophy as such. Philosophy is not without comic subjectivity, the very motion of short-circuiting that Žižek described above.

To finish on a clarifying note regarding the terms. She uses the word comedy in the general sense of what is funny or comical. But she also distinguishes the comical as a specific mode of comedy.

Different from jokes, irony and humor, she understands “the comical as a singular form of “funniness” at work in comedies that can be distinguished from some other forms.”¹⁴ How exactly this pans out, we will learn during our reading and discussions.

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Sign Up For The Reading Group

Starting on the 22nd of January, we will begin the Slovenian School Reading Group at Philosophy Portal.

For the first half of the year, we will dedicate one session each month to a chapter from Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More. After a break in the summer, we’ll continue with Alenka Zupančič’s The Odd One In.

Members of the Portal get free access to the Reading Group. If you are not a member, these are the ways to sign up:

1. Become a paid subscriber to my Patreon.

2. Become a paid subscriber to my Substack.

1. Žižek, S. (2006). Foreword. In M. Dolar, A voice and nothing more. MIT Press.

2. In his Das Kapital, Marx grounds the short-circuit regarding the theopolitics of capitalism with his concept of commodity fetishism.

3. This is how we can understand Lacan’s dictum that Marx invented the psychoanalytical symptom.

4. Žižek, S. (2006). Foreword. In M. Dolar, A voice and nothing more. MIT Press.

5. From this conversation:

6. (Lacan 1979, p. 22)

7. Dolar, M. (2006). A voice and nothing more (p. 4). MIT Press.

8. Ibid., p. 4.

9. Zupančič, A. (2008). The odd one in: On comedy (p. 3). MIT Press.

10. Ibid., p. 3.

11. Ibid., p. 5.

12. Ibid., p. 7.

13. Ibid., p. 8.

14. Ibid., p. 9.