Post-Communist Communism in Eastern Europe: A Rhetorical History of The Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis

Research Questions

The aims of the project were: (i) providing a conceptual history of the concept of communism within the work of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis; (ii) offering an interpretation of the role played by the idea of what is here referred to as post-communist communism within the School’s more general understanding and analysis of the present political conjuncture; and (iii) to study how the concept of communism has been and is employed in the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis’ analysis of historically existing socialism in Eastern Europe.

Results

Regarding the first aim, the project has been focused on the work of the School’s main philosophical leader, Slavoj Žižek. By focusing on the ways in which Žižek has made use of the notion of communism within his work, the project has been able to present important results on a previously understudied notion within his philosophy. From this can be drawn the conclusion that the ‘communist idea’ that Žižek has been purporting since 2008 cannot be reduced to just a rhetorical provocation or be read as a synonym of a critical philosophical practice. Instead, the conclusions drawn from the project can be summed up in the interpretation that the communist idea captures Žižek’s grappling with the problem of actualizing political ideas and thus plays an important role in the transformations of his political philosophy around the time of the 2007-2008 financial crash. Furthermore, the analysis of Žižek’s work on communism has shown how this notion offers a bridge between the philosophical and the political aspects of his work, allowing for conclusions to be drawn concerning the influence of his political analysis on certain central philosophical notions such as fantasy, idea, and ideology. 

The second aim of the project, connecting the notion of communism to an analysis of the contemporary political situation, has for the most part been focused on Žižek’s critique of Ernesto Laclau’s notion of populism. Against the wide-spread idea that the last decade constituted a populist moment in which left- and right-wing populisms struggled to re-politicize the political sphere after an era defined by post-political managerialism, the project’s results have shown how Žižek, already before the 2008 financial crisis (often said to be the instigator of the populist moment), had developed a philosophical critique of populism that brought together (and transformed) his philosophy through an analysis of the present political conjunction and the purported hope connected to the growth of populist politics. By focusing on the close relation between Žižek’s critique of populism and his development of the idea of communism, the project has allowed for the conclusion that the latter arises out of his understanding of the impotence of the former, giving birth to a Žižekian notion of populism radically different from those employed by mainstream work in Populism Studies. 

The final aim, to study Žižek’s analysis of communist ideological practice in Eastern Europe, has allowed the project to draw conclusions surrounding the importance of this analysis in his overall philosophical project. By focusing on the small differences in Žižek’s incessant return to a number of examples from Soviet and Yugoslavian communism, it was possible to point to how the concrete analysis constantly pushed his conceptual apparatus to its breaking point. Through his particular approach to this ideology, two important conclusions drawn from the project is (i) the importance of this analysis of how the ideology of Eastern European communism was practiced for several of Žižek’s most central philosophical notions (including for instance ideology, fantasy, and the idea), and (ii) the unique perspective that Žižek offers on the disastrous failure of twentieth century communism in Eastern Europe. In addition to this, the project has also shown the importance of distinguishing between communist ideology (as the analysis of how ideology functioned in communist Eastern Europe) and the communist idea (as the attempt to realize a political transformation) in Žižek’s work.

Outputs

[Publications, conference papers and media contributions as they appear.]