Engaging the burning issues of our time, Alenka Zupančič mobilizes philosophy to diagnose and theorize the antagonisms feeding our contemporary social symptoms. Her work has provided coordinates to work through our time of closure and catastrophe. ‘The apocalypse is still disappointing’, and, in this conversation with Christopher Zimmerman, Zupančič begins with the ‘end’. Our constant proclamation of the ‘end’—of art, of history, of ideology—coupled with the catastrophic thinking pervading the popular imagination, are symptomatic of the ‘fantasy of the end’. This fantasy is less about a future state of affairs than it is an ideological position that sustains the reality of the present. Before ‘ending’ with an expansive rumination on the task of thinking today, on the responsibilities of the theorist, and on the role of art in relation to truth, she discusses the most elaborate psychological defense mechanism: the concept of disavowal, which was the subject of her most recent book in English—Disavowal published in 2024 by Polity.
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