Editor’s Note: The following interview was originally published in The Sunday Island, a Colombo-based weekly newspaper.
What does it mean to claim that psychoanalysis is inherently feminist? How can the unconscious, that most enigmatic of terrains, illuminate the contingency at the heart of symbolic authority? And in what ways do desire, subjectivity, and gender refuse simple classification, persistently disrupting our frameworks for understanding human behaviour, culture, and technology? These questions are not idle speculation but the threads that guide the work of Alenka Zupančič, a thinker whose engagement with psychoanalysis, philosophy, and culture continues to challenge conventional approaches to understanding human life. Her reflections compel us to reconsider what it means to be a subject, how we negotiate our desires, and how symbolic structures—cultural, social, and linguistic—mediate our experience of the world.
Alenka Zupančič, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, has long been a key mind in contemporary thought, particularly in exploring the intersections between Lacanian psychoanalysis and philosophy, cultural critique, and feminist theory. Her work on desire, subjectivity, comedy, and ethics exemplifies a conceptual rigor that refuses simplification, insisting instead on attending to the structural gaps, paradoxes, and contradictions that define human experience. In her approach, psychoanalysis is not merely a clinical tool but a conceptual lens, one that illuminates the fractures and instabilities inherent in both individual and collective life. As she notes in her reflections, the very act of engaging with psychoanalysis is an intervention in thought itself: it is a mode of thinking, not simply a repository of knowledge or an explanatory framework.
I spoke with her a few months ago, and our discussion compelled me to revisit it repeatedly, reflecting on how to translate her ideas into a concise column. Every word she spoke carries the weight of the nuances that shape our understanding of life. Here, I have attempted to summarize what she shared in response to a series of questions I posed.
Zupančič begins by clarifying the nature of the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy, insisting that they are intimately connected yet distinct. “They are not one and the same thing, obviously,” she says, explaining that psychoanalysis emerges from its clinical practices, whereas philosophy constitutes a form of engagement that is itself a practice. To be a philosopher, she explains, is to “engage in a certain process of thinking, and of thinking about thinking,” a disciplined activity that develops concepts rather than subscribes to a predetermined worldview. Psychoanalysis, she emphasizes, is not merely another philosophy. It is “a singular discourse that has, or can have, the power to disrupt philosophy and philosophical thinking from within, orient it in a different way.” By this she means that psychoanalysis acts as an internal perturbation—a “clinamen”—that re-configures conceptual terrain, offering new ways of approaching traditional philosophical concepts such as the subject, truth, and the real.
Crucially, Zupančič stresses that the transformative potential of psychoanalysis does not lie in adding a psychological dimension to philosophy. Lacan’s insistence that “psychoanalysis is not psychology” highlights this distinction. What Freud and Lacan reveal, she explains, is the unconscious as a process, a form of thinking in its own right. “Thinking is very much part and parcel of the unconscious and its ‘work’ (Freud uses the word ‘Arbeit’),” she observes, underscoring that unconscious processes are structured, active, and meaningful in ways that exceed conscious comprehension. The Lacanian subject is not a hidden agent behind these processes; rather, it is “the name of this very split in thinking, suggesting that I also think where I am not, where I do not exist as subject of these thoughts, where I say ‘this is not me’.” The goal of analysis, therefore, is not to claim ownership over unconscious thoughts but to inhabit the radical division in which they exist.
This conception of subjectivity extends naturally to questions about human experience in the modern world. Zupančič distinguishes between two ways of conceiving the subject. The first treats subjectivity as roughly synonymous with the individual, shaped by social, cultural, and technological forces. In this view, “as ‘subjectivities’ we are a result of all kinds of structures and discourses,” and our experiences and choices are deeply conditioned by external frameworks. Yet she also proposes a more nuanced conception: the subject as a “symptom or blind spot of the discursivity as such, its inherent split.” Here, the subject is not the causal origin of contradictions or inconsistencies but their conceptual marker, the way in which gaps in discursivity become apparent. Freud’s encounter with hysterical symptoms exemplifies this perspective: hysteria is not simply a distortion of perception or a personal flaw but a response to structural deadlocks in reality. Zupančič observes, “Hysteria points to a – displaced – objective problem, it tells us something about the reality in which it emerges.” The subject emerges in and through these structural fractures, not as an autonomous agent but as a reflection of the incompleteness and tension embedded in social and psychic life.
Desire, in Lacanian theory, is similarly central to understanding human motivation, and Zupančič provides a detailed account of its mechanics. She characterizes desire as “absolutely central, nodal” because it unites heterogeneous registers—physiological, social, and linguistic. Desire emerges when a need is articulated to another, producing a margin between the object that satisfies the need and the demand for recognition or response. This margin, she stresses, constitutes “the field of desire proper,” a space that is neither fully object-oriented nor reducible to immediate satisfaction. Desire differs fundamentally from need: while need seeks cessation, closure, or the fulfilment of deprivation, desire thrives in incompleteness. As Zupančič explains, “Desire… aims precisely at the difference, the gap between what we demand and what we get.”
The objects of desire are thus not intrinsically significant; they acquire meaning insofar as they mediate the gap that constitutes desire itself. Fantasy plays a critical role in structuring this gap, providing an “armature” through which desire can articulate itself. Yet desire remains oriented toward absence rather than fulfillment, and the satisfaction of desire lies not in possessing a concrete object but in maintaining the relational space that makes desire intelligible. Zupančič emphasizes that desire’s central characteristic is this non-coincidence: it is “the object-cause” of the gap, a domain of its own, irreducible to immediate gratification.
Zupančič’s reflections on comedy illustrate how psychoanalytic insights extend into cultural critique. Comedy, she argues, is not merely a genre but a method of apprehending contradictions in human life. The most effective comedy is one that “takes its own lightness very seriously,” creating imaginative spaces in which objects of critique are dismantled without succumbing to mockery or derision. Direct mockery, she warns, often collapses under the gravity of its object, whereas comedy that constructs its own conceptual universe reveals human contradictions with subtlety and precision. Comedy, she notes, is deeply embodied, a form of wit that manifests bodily and psychic tensions. Importantly, it reveals the paradoxical nature of human finitude: “There is comedy because this finitude itself is not waterproof… it is as if our finitude had a leak in it.” Human finitude, she insists, is never simple or unproblematic; it is always marked by gaps, inconsistencies, and structural vulnerabilities, and comedy thrives in this space, exposing the failures and ruptures in our attempts to inhabit a coherent existence.
Ethics, too, is re-conceived through a psychoanalytic lens. Zupančič highlights the inseparability of ethical reflection from structural tensions in discourse. She emphasizes that ethics emerges from what Lacan identifies as the inherent surplus or heterogeneity within social bonds: “there is no discourse or social bond that does not involve a surplus, heterogeneous element.” Ethics, therefore, is not a matter of straightforward moral rules but an engagement with the irreducible inconsistencies, contradictions, and gaps that define relational and social life. Lacanian ethics illuminates how these structural tensions generate the conditions for ethical reflection, prompting us to confront rather than resolve the conflicts inherent in human experience.
Zupančič’s discussion of gender and sexuality similarly foregrounds gaps and structural ambiguities. While gender is often ascribed at birth based on anatomy, she stresses that conflicts arise primarily when drive sexuality becomes operative. Drawing on Freud and Laplanche, she notes the paradoxical temporality of sexual development: “What is acquired through the drives precedes what is innate and instinctual… at the time it emerges in puberty, instinctual sexuality… finds the seat already taken, as it were, by infantile drives, already and always present in the unconscious.” Gender, she argues, is fundamentally a question of identification rather than identity. Identification is a strategy to frame and stabilise the gaps at the core of sexuality, encompassing unconscious drives, desire, and enjoyment. She stresses, “Identification – even when I identify with this or that feature in the other – is never simply about that feature, it is about the void or gap that this feature helps me to frame, make sense of, to incorporate in my being.”
This insight extends to psychoanalysis’ engagement with feminist and queer theory. Zupančič observes that these fields are far from homogenous, with some theorists using psychoanalysis as a critical tool and others as an object of critique. She argues that Lacan’s formulation of the phallus exposes contingency in the symbolic order: “The importance of phallus comes not from those who have it, but from those who don’t… Its appearing against the background of its possible lack or non-being is precisely what accounts for the symbolic rather than simply the anatomic character of the phallus.” The phallus is defined by absence rather than presence, revealing the hidden contingencies underlying social hierarchies and symbolic authority. Psychoanalysis, she maintains, provides the conceptual framework for articulating these structures, challenging simplistic readings of power, gender, and desire while offering new avenues for critique and understanding.
Zupančič also reflects on emerging trends in psychoanalytic research, emphasizing conceptual innovation and reactivation. While new universal concepts may be rare, she highlights the ongoing potential to reinterpret existing ideas in novel ways. Lacan’s engagement with Freud exemplifies this, transforming clinical insights into living theoretical constructs. She notes promising areas of inquiry, including intersections with politics, ideology critique, and explorations of artificial intelligence. In particular, she recognises the work of Slavoj Žižek as exemplary in demonstrating psychoanalysis’ reach beyond the clinic. As she notes, “For example, a very important and unique branch of ‘ideology critique’ has been developed in the works of Slavoj Žižek, which differs from most standard accounts.” Zupančič emphasizes that Žižek’s approach illuminates contradictions and tensions inherent in social and political structures, showing how psychoanalytic concepts can interrogate ideology and reveal inconsistencies often overlooked by conventional analysis. His work exemplifies the ongoing vitality of psychoanalytic thought as a conceptual practice capable of reshaping our understanding of society, politics, and culture.
In addition to ideological critique, Zupančič highlights emerging research into artificial intelligence, noting its potential to transform our understanding of subjectivity and desire. While still in the early stages, she suggests that psychoanalytic tools can help us trace how technological mediation reshapes our psychic and social life, illuminating the new forms of gaps, contradictions, and split that emerge in human subjectivity under digital conditions.
Zupančič articulates a vision of psychoanalysis as a lens for understanding the irreducible complexities of human existence. From the structure of desire to the paradoxes of comedy, from gender identification to the ethical tensions of social life, her work foregrounds the gaps, contradictions, and structural ambiguities that define human experience. In her account, psychoanalysis is not simply a clinical tool but a philosophical practice, a method of conceptual investigation capable of revealing the hidden frameworks that shape thought, subjectivity, and social relations. It is in these structural voids and inconsistencies, she suggests, that both human vulnerability and conceptual insight reside.
