Uploaded April 2023 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Alenka Zupančič - Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax
Book Discussion
April 8, 2023
Participants: Alenka Zupančič, Slavoj Žižek, Christopher Fynsk, Eric Santner, Frank Ruda
Discussion was moderated by Mladen Dolar.
Alenka Zupančič - Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax
Book Discussion
April 8, 2023
Participants: Alenka Zupančič, Slavoj Žižek, Christopher Fynsk, Eric Santner, Frank Ruda
Discussion was moderated by Mladen Dolar.


![Philip Beesley. Design methods for Public Space. 2018
http://www.egs.edu Philip Beesley, Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. June 24th, 2018. Public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought.
Philip Beesley was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, UK and is now based in Canada. Beesley is an architect and sculptor whose experimental work traverses and transcends proscribed notions of architecture, digital media art, technology, design, biology, fashion, and engineering.
Holding a Bachelor of Fine Art from Queen’s University (Kingston, Canada), a Diploma in Architectural and Mechanical Drafting/Machining from Humber College (Toronto), and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Toronto, Beesley has held positions at several universities and institutions, including the University of Nottingham, the Bartlett School of Architecture/University College London, the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture/CITA of the Royal Danish Academy, the Pratt Institute of Design, and the University of Dalhousie (Canada). In 2011, Beesley was appointed Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo (Canada), where he is also the Director of the Integrated Group for Visualization, Design and Manufacturing as well as the Director of Riverside Architectural Press.
He is the founder of Philip Beesley Architect Inc. (PBAI), a Toronto-based, cross-disciplinary design firm and collective that is associated with the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture, whose “design methods combine the durable crafts of heavy machining and building with advanced digital visualization, industrial design, digital prototyping, and mechatronics engineering.” Recent installations include Aerial Well Study (Microwave International New Media Arts Festival, Hong Kong, 2014), Epiphyte Membrane (Photography Playground, Berlin, 2014), Epiphyte Chamber (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2013), Epiphyte Spring (Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, 2013), Radiant Soil (Espace EDF Fondation, Paris, 2013), and Epiphyte Veil (VIA Festival, Maubeuge / EXIT Festival, Créteil / Lété à Saint-Sauveur Festival, Lille, 2013).
In 2010, Beesley’s Hylozoic Ground (designed with, among others, Rob Gorbet and Rachel Armstrong) was selected as Canada’s entry at the Venice Biennale for Architecture. The piece forms part of the Hylozoic series, initiated at the Musée Des Beaux-Arts in Montréal in 2007, it has since been presented at numerous venues, among them the Lexus Hybrid Art Show (Moscow, 2011), City Gallery Wellington (2012), and, with Sibyl, the 2012 Sydney Biennale. As “responsive architecture,” these installations of Beesley’s answer to a reciprocal relatedness.
Following, or rather preceding this, Beesley asks in the introduction of his book, Near-Living Architecture: Work in Progress from the Hylozoic Ground Collaboration 2011-2013 (edited by Philip Beesley, Riverside Architectural Press, 2014): “Can architecture feel, and know, and respond to their occupants? Might buildings begin, in primitive ways, to come alive?” Convinced, in accordance with the old idea of hylozoism, that “all things are potentially animate,” the “recent progress in the science of artificial life and information technology” seems, for Beesley, to point to “an increasingly diffused line between organic and inorganic matter.”[1]
The author and editor of several books, as well as the author of numerous book chapters and articles, Beesley has also received many prestigious awards, such as the Prix de Rome for Architecture, VIDA 11.0, the Far Eastern International Digital Architecture Award (FEIDAD), the Architizer A+ Award, the ACADIA Award for Emerging Digital Practice, and the Canadian Architect Award of Excellence, to name but a few.
[1] “Philip Beesley: Being responsive,” Interview with Timothy Moore, Architecture Australia, September 2012 (Vol 101: No 5), http://architectureau.com/articles/being-responsive/ (last accessed June 5, 2015) Philip Beesley. Design methods for Public Space. 2018](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZpT6gvk6FGM/mqdefault.jpg)






![Mladen Dolar. Oedipus Revisited. 2018
http://www.egs.edu Mladen Dolar, Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. June 20th, 2018. Public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought.
Mladen Dolar, born in Maribor, Slovenia, is a senior research fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Dolar’s area of research is within German classical philosophy, German idealism, theoretical psychoanalysis, structuralism, and the philosophy of music and film.
After obtaining a diploma in Philosophy and French from the University of Ljubljana in 1978, Dolar continued his studies at the Université de Paris VIII-Vincennes Saint-Denis (1979–80) and at the University of Westminster, London (1989–90). In 1992, he received a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana with a dissertation entitled Heglova Fenomenologija duha. Dialektika zavesti in samozavedanja (Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Dialectic of Consciousness and Self-consciousness). A member of the Philosophy Department since 1980, Dolar was appointed assistant professor in 1984, “docent” of German Classical Philosophy in 1992, associate professor of Philosophy and Theoretical Psychoanalysis in 1996, and, in 2002, took up his current position as Senior Research Fellow. Other academic appointments include a research stay at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen, Germany (2000–01), at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands (2010–12), where he served as an advising researcher on the project After Hegel, and, in the fall of 2013, an appointment as Visiting Scholar in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago.
Together with Slavoj Žižek and Rastko Močnik, Dolar founded the infamous “Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis” in the late 1970s. Their aim was, and continues to be, to combine German Idealism (Hegel in particular), Marxism (with and through the Frankfurt School), and the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Structuralism as a form of analysis in addressing contemporary issues. He is also one of the founders of the Ljubljana-based, and closely affiliated, Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, as well as of the Society for Cultural Studies. In addition, Dolar is an editorial board member of both the bi-monthly periodical Problemi, which focuses on psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and cultural studies, and of the Analecta book series, focusing mainly on translations of key works into Slovenian as well as on the work of Slovenian writers in the field; both are published by the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis.
The author of ten books in Slovenian, Mladen Dolar is perhaps best known internationally for Operas Second Death (co-authored with Slavoj Žižek, Routledge, 2001) and A Voice and Nothing More (MIT Press, 2006). In the former, “a passionate exploration of opera––the genre, its masterpieces, and the nature of death,” the two authors “explore the strange compulsions that overpower characters in Mozart and Wagner as well as our own desires to die and to go to the opera.” A Voice and Nothing More, which has been translated into six languages thus far, “goes beyond Derridas idea of ‘phonocentrism’ and revives and develops Lacans claim that the voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object (objet a). […] He investigates the object voice on a number of different levels—the linguistics of the voice, the metaphysics of the voice, the ethics of the voice (with the voice of conscience), the paradoxical relation between the voice and the body, the politics of the voice—and he scrutinizes the uses of the voice in Freud and Kafka. With this foundational work, Dolar gives us a philosophically grounded theory of the voice as a Lacanian object-cause.”
Mladen Dolar has published over one hundred papers, articles, and book chapters, many of which have been translated. Some of his most recent publications include the essay/book What’s in a Name (edited by Janez Janša, Aksioma 2014), “There Are More Important Things Than Childhood,” a text “on the glorification of childhood through Kafka and Oedipus” (in Janez Janša, Life II [in Progress], Maska 2014), and “To Be or Not to Be? No, thank you,” in Lubitsch Cant Wait: A Collection of Ten Philosophical Discussions on Ernst Lubitschs Film Comedy, which he co-edited with Ivana Novak and Jela Krecic (Slovenska kinoteka, 2014). Forthcoming by Duke University Press is Dolar’s latest book, The Riskiest Moment. Mladen Dolar. Oedipus Revisited. 2018](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/d2l8hZkskKI/mqdefault.jpg)
