Perverse Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the End - Dr. Alenka Zupančič - October 2022

"Part of the Critical Humanities for the Liberal Arts’s Gladys Krieble Delmas Lecture Series 2022-2023 at the American University of Beirut Abstract The classical formula of disavowal formulated by Octave Mannoni, »I know well, but all the same«, undergoes interesting and far-reaching permutations in contemporary social context. When it comes to our dealing with and (non)responding to various crises, we usually point the finger at the deniers and their »irrational« attitudes. Yet far more generalized and socially problematic is the attitude which combines full acknowledgement and denial in one and the same movement. Moreover, not only does knowledge about some problem smoothly combine with our ignoring it, it also seems that it makes the ignoring possible: to be able to say that »we know well« often seems to actually make it possible for us to ignore the real of this knowledge. Disavowal is thus undergoing a doubly perverse twist, which constitutes the main object of analysis in this lecture. Bio Dr. Alenka Zupančič is a Slovene philosopher and social theorist, one of the prominent members of the ""Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis."". She works as Research Councilor at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences. She is also professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, and is invited as guest lecturer to numerous universities worldwide. Notable for her work on the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis, she is the author of numerous articles and many books, including Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan; Why Psychoanalysis: Three Interventions; The Odd One In: On Comedy; What is Sex? and, forthcoming, Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax."