Alenka Zupančič (The Institute of Philosophy of the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) The report will explore the encounter between psychoanalysis and philosophy at the point where the two seem to be the most incompatible.
Sex (and psychoanalytic theory of sexuality) is something that philosophy usually doesn’t know what to do with; sex is the question usually left out in even the most friendly philosophical appropriations of Lacan and his concepts.
And ontology (as since of pure being) is something that psychoanalysis doesn’t know what to do with, or is highly critical about.
The report will take these two notions and cast them, so to say, in the opposite camps. It will argue that sex is the properly philosophical (ontological) question of psychoanalysis, and present some consequences that this shift of perspective has for philosophy.
Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
Philosophers in postmodern fashion gave up on traditional concepts: subject, truth, real, and put in metaphysical past. Then along came Lacan, who said the concepts are not problematic in themselves, but the way we use them.