On Thursday, December 10, 2020, the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU awarded doctoral certificates to ten new doctors of philosophy at 3rd level doctoral study programme Comparative study of ideas and cultures. Due to the current epidemiological situation, the ceremony will take place as soon as the circumstances will allow it.

Branko Kromar, MA become doctor of philosophy at Cultural history study module with the dissertation: Diplomacy and ethics: some selected aspects.
Mentors: Prof. Milan Jazbec, Ph.D. and Assist. Prof. Ana Hofman, Ph.D.

Simona Kostanjšek Brglez become doctor of philosophy at Cultural history study module with the dissertation: Greek and Roman mythology in Slovenian art in the 20th and 21st century.
Mentor: Assoc. Prof. Barbara Murovec, Ph.D.

Alan Shear, MA become doctor of philosophy at Transformation of modern thought study module with the dissertation: Martin Heidegger: place and memory in sculpture. A Heideggerian interpretation of the memorial sculptures of Bogdan Bogdanović.
Mentor: Prof. Aleš Erjavec, Ph.D.

Aljoša Kolenc become doctor of philosophy at Transformation of modern thought study module with the dissertation: From das Unbewusste to Une bévue.
Mentor: Prof. Alenka Zupančič, Ph.D.

Tanja Cukjati become doctor of philosophy at Cultural history study module with the dissertation: Building the public image of woman as a socio-economic player in the interwar period: the case of Slovenian periodicals.
Mentors: Prof. Marina Lukšič Hacin, Ph.D. and Assoc. Prof. Mirjam Milharčič Hladnik, Ph.D.

Magdalena Germek become doctor of philosophy at Transformation of modern thought study module with the dissertation: The dialectic of formalisation in the project of Alain Badiou’s second Critique.
Mentor: Prof. Rado Riha, Ph.D.

Aleksandar Matković become doctor of philosophy at Transformation of modern thought study module with the dissertation: The fascist abstraction: on the role of labor in the political economy of Fascism.
Mentors. Assoc. Prof. Peter Klepec, Ph.D. and Prof. Mladen Dolar, Ph.D.

Lea Kuhar become doctor of philosophy at Transformation of modern thought study module with the dissertation: The problem of the specific objectivity in Marx’s critique of political economy.
Mentor: Prof. Rado Riha, Ph.D.

Vanja Huzjan become doctor of philosophy at Slovene studies study module with the dissertation: Material culture of children in Ljubljana and its surroundings since the early 20th century until World War 2.
Mentor: Prof. Maja Godina Golija, Ph.D.

Nina Ditmajer, Ph.D. become doctor of philosophy for the second time at Literature in context study module with the dissertation: Slovenian poetry in Styria between 1758 and 1848: models, genres and reception.
Mentor: Assist. Prof. Luka Vidmar, Ph.D.

Congratulations to new doctors of philosophy!

Prof. Jelica Šumič Riha, Ph.D.
Acting dean

Doctoral study Comparative study of ideas and cultures, module Literature in Context and the ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies invite you to a guest lecture on Tuesday, 8 December 2020, at 11.30.

Galin Tihanov

(Queen Mary University of London)

will speak – via video link (Zoom link, Meeting ID: 883 2795 5020, Passcode: 188945) – on the topic:

Literary Theory vs. Poetics: On the Recent Skepticism towards Theory.

His lecture addresses some of the reasons for the resistance to theory we have been living with over the last few decades. One of these reasons is the realisation that theory (specifically literary theory in this case) has not had universal applicability. Theory has not been the primary mode of reflection on literature beyond the Western tradition (however risky in its generality, and open to accusations of essentialism, this notion might be). In other, equally powerful (but non-Western in their formation) cultural zones (China and the Middle East would be good examples), there has not been, historically speaking, much demand for theory; instead, literature would be reflected upon through the equally enabling prism of poetics – a very different prism indeed. Literary theory derives its specificity from being the outcome of a particular historical negotiation over the place literature occupies vis-a-vis the state and its institutions, vis-a-vis religion, and other important societal factors – and only in conjunction with (and sometimes in the invisible shadow of) these larger emancipatory developments does literary theory emerge as a specific mode of reflection on literature. This negotiation – or, if you prefer, emancipatory struggle – took place in the West in ways it would not occur in China or the Middle East until very recently, and even when it did occur there, the outcome has been less clear-cut and more circumspect. China and the Middle East remained over a very long time cultural zones in which sophisticated poetics thrived (and its impact in these cultures has endured), but literary theory, in the European (including Russian) understanding of it, was not a major presence. All this is just a neutral description of a historically induced difference – a profound difference – in how these cultures have related to the place and tasks of literature in society. In the rest of the lecture, I try to develop a distinction between literary theory and poetics that could accommodate the specific experience of large and powerful cultural zones, such as China and the Middle East (and to this one should also add Persia and, to some extent, the Indian Subcontinent).

Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He has held visiting appointments at universities in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. He is the author of five monographs, including The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2019). Tihanov’s research interests range from Russian, German, and Central-European intellectual history to world literature, cultural theory, cosmopolitanism, and exile. He is elected member of Academia Europaea, past president of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory, and member of the Executive Board of the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University; he is also honorary scientific advisor to the Institute of Foreign Literatures, CASS (Beijing). He is currently completing Cosmopolitanism: A Very Short Introduction, commissioned by Oxford UP.

We are very happy to announce, that Platforma 2 has just come out and is available online in open access – open.

Platforma is a publication in which our students present their completed or ongoing research. As a collection of original scientific texts, Platforma does not constrict the authors to the same field and does not group them according to a predefined set of research topics. Its purpose is, on the opposite, to connect contributions from a wide range of fields in the humanities and social sciences and investigate a diverse range of research topics. Platforma 1 was published in 2019 and can be accessed at – open.

Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU invites you to seminars and a public lecture by Assoc. Prof. Frank Ruda:

Grotesque Sovereignty.

The lecture in English language will be on Friday, September 11, 2020 at 5 p. m. at Atrij ZRC, Novi trg 2, Ljubljana.

In a time when new figures of sovereignty and authority are emerging everywhere, the cognitive map of the situation seems to be lacking more than ever. The political present confronts us with types of sovereigns that are capable of surviving all scandals and seem immune to all forms of critique. The lecture will return to Marx, Hegel, Foucault and Badiou and try to gather elements for a contemporary critique of the grotesque sovereign.

Frank Ruda is Senior Lecturer in philosophy at the University of Dundee. He is also professor at the European Graduate School (Saas Fee / Malta) and visiting professor at the Capital Normal University in Beijing. His last publications include “The Dash – The Other Side of Absolute Knowing” (with Rebecca Comay; MIT Press 2018), “Gegen-Freiheit. Komik und Fatalismus” (Konstanz UP 2018),“Indifferenz und Wiederholung” (Konstanz UP 2018).“

Kindly invited!

In light of preventing the spread of Covid-19, there can be a maximum of 50 people in the hall. The hall can be used in strict compliance with all instructions of the National Institute of Public Health (NIJZ) and internal instructions of PŠ ZRC SAZU and ZRC SAZU regarding the organization of events:

• mandatory use of face masks;
• hand disinfection;
• appropriate (at least 1.5 m) distance between participants.

Kindly invited to the second information day for doctoral study 2020/2021 enrolment on Tuesday, 25th Of August 2020 at 5 p.m at Atrij ZRC (Novi trg 2 street, Ljubljana).

Application for enrolment deadline is on 11th of September 2020.

On Thursday, 3rd of September 2020 at 11.00 AM, Aleksandar Matković will defend his PhD thesis with title:

The Fascist abstraction: on the role of labor in the political economy of Fascism.

Mentors: Assoc. Prof. Peter Klepec and Prof. Mladen Dolar.

PhD defence will be in English language via ZOOM:

Join Zoom Meeting:

Link

Meeting ID: 848 8673 1960

Passcode: 178939

Kindly invited!

Kindly invited to a public lecture by dr. Ana Ljubojević:

Cycling to Vukovar, walking to Srebrenica. Embodied post-war commemorative practices.

The aim of the lecture is to analyse cultural trauma related to the sites of memory of war. It approaches cultural trauma from the perspective of spatial mobility engagement and perceptions of people visiting war monuments and commemorative events. The presentation is based on an the results of the ethnographic studies of visits to memorial sites in forms of marches or cycling marathons, organised prior to the official commemorations or on a separate occasion. Marches, hikes and cycling marathons necessitate certain degree of labour and effort, therefore they are potent case studies for studying emotional investment, transmission and translation of memory. The researcher will present participant observation from following events: 1) Zagreb-Vukovar cycling marathon, 2) Tuzla-Srebrenica “Marš mira” (Peace march), 3) Perugia-Assisi “Marcia per la pace” (Peace march), and 4) Auschwitz-Birkenau March of the Living.

A lecture in English language will be on Monday, 27th of January 2020 at 4. p. m. at Mala Dvorana ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 4, 2nd floor, Ljubljana.

Ana Ljubojević is a Marie Curie fellow at the CSEES, University of Graz, Austria. Previously, she was a EURIAS postdoctoral fellow at the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies (PIAST) in Warsaw and a NEWFELPRO postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity, Citizenship and Migration (CEDIM), Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb, Croatia. She obtained her PhD in Political systems and institutional change at the Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy. She has conducted research on judicial and non-judicial mechanisms of transitional justice in Croatia and Serbia and has research interests in memory studies, cultural trauma and social production of memory.

Kindly invited!

Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU invites you to a public lecture at Cultural History study module by Prof. Wulf Kansteiner:

Migration, Racism, and Digital Media in Contemporary European Memory.

Europe’s political crisis is a crisis of memory. The cosmopolitan memories of the second modernity, tied to an optimistic interpretation of lessons learned from World War II and the Holocaust, are rapidly losing their hold on the popular imagination. Cosmopolitan memory is pushed aside by traditional nationalistic memories on the one hand, and new prefigurative memories of future climate catastrophes, on the other hand. Both competitors owe their meteoric ascent to the digitization of memory across in the West. The migration crisis of 2015/16 and the European election of 2019 offer excellent opportunities to study the competition between different memory regimes on the ground in Germany, the former heartland of cosmopolitan memory, and speculate about the future of European memory cultures.

A lecture in English language will be on Wednesday, 22nd of January 2020 at 4 p. m. at Mala dvorana ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 4, 2nd Floor, Ljubljana.

Wulf Kansteiner is professor of history at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published in the fields of media history, memory studies, historical theory, and Holocaust studies. He is the author of Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (2016), In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (2006), Historical Representation and Historical Truth (2009), and coeditor of The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (2006). He is also co-editor of the journal Memory Studies. Wulf Kansteiner is Memory Studies Association, member of the advisory board and member of the executive committee co-editor and co-founder of the Sage-Journal Memory Studies.

Kindly invited!

Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU invites you to a public lecture by dr. Karin Kneissl:

Diplomacy Powers History.

Are we still in need of diplomacy – or can politicians do it themselves, as the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George already claimed in 1919. According to the Lisbon Reform Treaty 2009 major competences in foreign policy decision-making has been transferred from the Council of Foreign Affairs to the Council of Heads of State and Government. Diplomats are seemingly marginalized. Both craft and art of diplomacy are substituted by position papers. Confrontation rather than dialogue determines diplomatic encounters. This guest-lecture is an assessment of what has happened to diplomacy over the past century and where this discipline is to be positioned in today’s international relation.

A lecture in English language will be on Wednesday, 8th of January 2020 at 11. a. m. at Prešernova dvorana SAZU, Novi trg 4, Ljubljana.

Karin Kneissl served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Austria 2017/2019. She studied law and Arabic at the University of Vienna 1983-1987, was granted a scholarship for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1988, where she accomplished her thesis research, later on studied in Amman and on a grant basis at GU Washington, DC. She is a graduate of ENA Paris. Dr. Kneissl joined the Austrian Ministry for Foreign Affairs in 1990, served in Paris and Madrid, as well as in the Legal office. She quitted the diplomatic service in october 1998 and turned into a freelance analyst. She has authored several books on energy, geopolitics and the Middle East. In addition to her lectures (Vienna National Defence College, Frankfurt EBS, Beirut, Tehran etc) Karin keeps a tiny farm southeast of Vienna, where she lives and works.

Kindly invited!

Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU invites you to a public lecture by Aaron Schuster:

Theory of the Brake Up.

Bad Boyfriends from Socrates to Kafka.

Just as we speak of Platonic love, so we should speak of the Platonic break up, which is, of course, the ideal form of the break up. Its formula, invented by Socrates, has two parts:

(1) I am nothing.

(2) You would be happier with someone else.

In this seminar Schuster will trace a certain history of the break up, following the development and transformations of this seminal formula. Breaking up is, generally speaking, a neglected topic of philosophical inquiry, even while love is one of its most precious concepts. He proposes to invert this hierarchy: instead of seeing the break up as nothing but the failure and death of love, he will attempt to grasp love from the perspective of the break up, that is, to understand splitting, separation, rupture, abandonment—the end—as a phenomenon in its own right, essential for any understanding of love. We will proceed from Plato to Kierkegaard to Freud (the problem of ending in psychoanalysis, considered in relation to the problem of ending in art), passing along the way Franz Kafka, Fernando Pessoa, and Georg Lukács.

The lecture in English language will be on Friday 6th of December 2019 at 4 p. m. at Mala dvorana ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 4, 2nd Floor, Ljubljana.

Aaron Schuster, Ph. D. is a philosopher and writer, based in Amsterdam. He is the author of The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (MIT Press, 2016). He is a co-author, together with Eric Santner and William Mazzarella, of Sovereignty Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment (University of Chicago Press, 2019), and his book Spasm: A Philosophy of Tickling is forthcoming from Cabinet Books (2020). He is a senior research advisor at the V-A-C Foundation, Moscow.

A draft of the paper will be made available to seminar participants.

Kindly invited!