Participants: Rana Anani, Inke Arns, Zdenka Badovinac, Fares Chalabi, Chatbot Selfie, Vladan Joler, Bara Kolenc, Vasif Kortun, Bojana Piškur, Omnia El Shakry, Alenka Zupančič, Jalal Toufic
Concept: Zdenka Badovinac
Stories Beyond the Radar conference takes place around Walid Raad’s exhibition at Moderna galerija in Ljubljana, where stories, photographs, videos, sculptures, and installations explore how worlds are built, inhabited, and narrated, and how objects, images, and stories shape both our historical and imaginary landscapes.
The conference examines how contemporary art and theory respond to a reality marked by multiple temporalities – labyrinthine, non-linear, digital, instantaneous, eternal, asynchronous, and speculative, among others – and asks how we might rethink art history, traditions, and the museums of the future under such conditions.
Our conference refers to the present time as a manifestly interrupted one, not only because we live in a time of interrupted attention but for deeper structural reasons: Whereas modernity oriented itself toward the future and conceived time as continuity and progress, today time appears as a series of breaks, folds, repetitions, and pauses. Moreover, space is no longer a fixed territory, but a field of simultaneous and sometimes conflicting presences.
Leaning on the 2006 exhibition Interrupted Histories at Moderna galerija – which brought Eastern European artists into dialogue with artists from the Middle East – the conference examines artistic practices emerging from what we call “spaces of interrupted histories.” In this context, the very conditions for sustaining long-term historical narratives have been disrupted by centuries of economic, religious, and epistemological struggle. While some artists from these regions register the absence and continual undermining of certain traditions as scenes of individual and collective trauma, of forces affecting subjects in the world, others view this absence as symptomatic of more pervasive, insidious, and fracturing forces where the very concept of “the world” begins to come apart.
Walid Raad’s exhibition also features collages by Fadwa Hassoun, a former Lebanese Army intelligence officer who assigned code names to local and international leaders during the Lebanese Civil War. These collages represent a “vocabulary” that has not been incorporated into knowledge systems.
Artists are developing similar “counter-vocabularies” in times of increasing violence when new forms of codifying cultural heritage are constantly emerging – along with new ways of colonizing knowledge, especially with the help of AI. In our dangerous times, one of the important strategies is to avoid the radar of these categorization and commodification processes, and learn to use our imagination, knowledge and technology differently in the service of “counterintelligence activities.”
Stories Beyond the Radar
International conference
Moderna galerija, Ljubljana
14 — 16 May 2026
Participants: Rana Anani, Inke Arns, Zdenka Badovinac, Fares Chalabi, Vladan Joler, Bara Kolenc, Vasıf Kortun , Bojana Piškur, Chatbot Selfie, Omnia El Shakry, Jalal Toufic, Alenka Zupančič,
Moderatos: Walid Raad, Igor Španjol, Adela Železnik
Thursday, 14 May 2026
17:00 Walid Raad, guided tour around his exhibition Festival of (In)Gratitude
18:00 Martina Vovk, director's opening remarks
Moderator: Walid Raad
18: 15 – 19:15 Jalal Toufic, Dying to Read Artaud’s Anamorphic Text To Have Done With the Judgment of God?
Friday, 15 May 2026
9:30-10:00 registration
Moderator: Igor Španjol
10:00 – 11:00 Zdenka Badovinac, Beyond 1983
11:00 – 12:00 Vasıf Kortun, Unsent Letters: Turkey’s Absence from the International Canon
12:00 – 12:30 break
12:30 – 13:30 Rana Anani, Art History Without Art
13:30 – 14:30 Fares Chalabi, Modernity, Postmodernity and the Resurrection of Tradition
14:30 – 16:30 break
Moderator: Adela Železnik
16:30 – 17:30 Alenka Zupančič, “Don’t expect too much from the end of the world”
17:30 – 18:30 Vladan Joler, Data Situationism and Tactical Archives
Saturday, 16 May 2026
Moderator: Igor Španjol
10:00 – 11:00 Omnia El Shakry, Psychoanalysis, History, and the Lesser Death
11:00 – 12:00 Inke Arns, A Hand with Six Fingers, or: Events, Territories and Documents, Both Fake and Real
12:00 – 12:30 break
12:30 – 13:30 Bara Kolenc, Instanternity
13:30 – 14:30 The Cultural “Other”. A slideshow by Chatbot Selfie
14:30 – 16:00 break
16:00 – 17:00 Bojana Piškur, Four Voices Across Empires
17:00 – 18:00 Walid Raad, guided tour around his exhibition Festival of (In)Gratitude
18:15 – 19:15 Presentation of the publication The Collected Writings of a Mortal to Death by Jalal Toufic, Vol I, No Place Press
More about the presentations and speakers
Rana Anani: Art History Without Art
Starting from the part related to lost art in Walid Raad’s exhibition, this talk discusses hidden aspects of Palestinian art history from the perspectives of loss and disappearance as well as the relevant broader history of the region. Rather than treating loss as absence, the talk explores how it can be a way to reveal suppressed and controversial histories. By considering the fate of art and the fate of artists as closely connected, tracing this connection through stories of exhibitions, individual artworks, and artifacts, situates the loss of Palestinian art within a broader historical context of colonial violence while showing art as a site of resistance.
Rana Anani is a Palestinian curator and writer specializing in visual arts. Her research interests include Palestinian art history, the intersection of visual art with loss, erasure, and archives, as well as the role of art as a tool of solidarity. Anani is currently a fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies and a board member at the Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah. She is the editor of Emergence to Light, the memoir of the artist Nabil Anani, and Darb Al Ghoul, the memoir of the artist Sliman Mansour.
Inke Arns: A Hand with Six Fingers, or: Events, Territories and Documents, Both Fake and Real
There is an ingenious work by the GDR-born media artist Nadja Buttendorf which has quite magical qualities, because when you wear FINGERring (2016), a life-size silicone replica of the artist’s left ring finger, every picture of you will look as if it were generated by AI. Why? Because AI usually has problems generating images of hands with the correct number of fingers.
This lecture is going to compare interesting moments of dissimulation, or concealment, either with the help of a speculative narrative, speculative documents or speculative dating – or simply copying, repetition and appropriation. All these artistic techniques (which are all about verisimilitude) serve to insert oneself into an existing (historical) discourse and to subvert and capture it from within.
The lecture will look at the work of IRWIN, Walid Raad, Nikolai Evreinov and others.
Dr. Inke Arns is the director of the HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, Germany (www.hmkv.de). She is a curator and author in the fields of media art and theory, net cultures and Eastern Europe, who has worked internationally since 1993. From 2021 to 2022 she was visiting professor for curatorial practice at the Art Academy Münster, and she was also the curator of the Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo (artist: Jakup Ferri) at the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia (2022). Her recent exhibitions include Artists & Agents. Performance Art and Secret Services (2019), House of Mirrors: AI as Phantasm (2022), Was ist Kunst, IRWIN? (2023), Comrade Sun (2024/2025), and Robotron: Working Class and Intelligentsia (2025/2026). She is the author of articles and books (most recently Tutorials (2024)) on contemporary art, media art and net culture, and has edited numerous exhibition catalogues. www.inkearns.de
Zdenka Badovinac: Beyond 1983
The year 1984 had already happened in 1983.
This was the year the American battleship USS New Jersey sailed into Lebanese coastal waters, and also the year that teenager Walid Raad emigrated to the United States on some other ship.
In 1983, the name of the art group Laibach was officially banned in Ljubljana, and the International Monetary Fund began to bail out the heavily indebted Yugoslav economy. This “aid” essentially meant gradual integration into the global neoliberal market dictated by the U.S. Today, all key companies are linked to AI development in the U.S., and it is likely that this superpower also influences the formation of “imagined communities” (Anderson) across the globe. What does this mean for regions with such a conflict-ridden past and present as the Balkans and the Middle East?
And what role can artist archives play in resisting dominant modes of encoding history? Among other things, Walid Raad is also exhibiting interventions in the archives of the Moderna galerija. In 2006, the exhibition Interrupted Histories was held in these same spaces, dedicated primarily to artist archives from Eastern Europe and also from the Middle East. The exhibition proposed an alternative history based on the traumatic experiences of these spaces and their lost histories.
The Balkans and the Middle East are, among other things, connected by the Mediterranean Sea. We might consider a distinct Mediterranean imagination (Campagna), linked to migrations, odysseys, ruins, and even romances, which is meant to help repair the past and build other worlds. Contemporary art once again moves with ease between magical and mythological worlds, as if these too were not structured by power. Nevertheless, it is all the more important to think of them – as well as of all other forms of intelligence, such as AI, madness, humor, and vernacular languages – as potential subversive tools that attempt to keep our knowledge beyond the reach of the radar and the year 1983.
Zdenka Badovinac served as Director of Moderna galerija in Ljubljana between 1993 and 2020. From 2022 to 2023 she was Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. She currently works as an interdependent curator and author.
In her work, Badovinac deals with the historicization of Eastern European art, the urgencies of contemporary art in an international world, and situated modes of cultural production. She initiated the first Eastern European art collection, Arteast 2000+ at Moderna galerija in Ljubljana. She curated numerous exhibitions of international relevance.
Her most recent books are Unannounced Voices: Curatorial Practice and Changing Institutions (Sternberg Press / Thoughts on Curating, 2022) and Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-Socialist Europe (Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, 2019). As Director of Moderna galerija she co-founded L'Internationale, a confederation of seven modern and contemporary European art institutions. Between 2010 and 2013 she served as the President of CIMAM, the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art. In 2020 Zdenka Badovinac received the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory.
Fares Chalabi: Modernity, Postmodernity and the Resurrection of Tradition
By analyzing a number of works by Walid Raad I will try to show how modernity as a transparent subsumption of image to concept represses the political and existential reading inherent to these works. In contrast, postmodernity will provide a reading of these works that will give them back all their political and existential dimensions, constituting by that a critique of the modern approach. It remains that the postmodern approach itself will have to be supplemented by a reading stemming from Toufic’s work, i.e. by a reading that will approach these works from the vantage point of the resurrected tradition. If rationality, as Toufic says, defines itself as a rejection of death, and by that, we can add, is a strategy not only to foreclose and depreciate life, as Nietzsche has shown, but also a way to repress tradition, the aim will be then to show how the resurrected tradition, that includes death in thought, sheds new light on the way we understand art in particular and reality in general. In fact, the colonial cultural project thrived on the destruction of tradition, a de-codification allowing capitalism to spread its hegemonic views of the world. In areas of war, such as those where we live in the Middle East, areas where tradition has withdrawn under the unleashing of violence, the resurrection of tradition thus stands as the ultimate act of resistance.
Chalabi was born in Beirut in 1977. He obtained his BA in philosophy in 2002 from the Lebanese University (UL), and a diploma in architecture from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) in 2004. He continued his studies in philosophy at Paris 8 where he obtained a Master 2 in 2008, and his PhD in 2017. Chalabi taught philosophy and art theory at the American University of Beirut (AUB), Saint Joseph University (USJ), and the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) between 2012 and 2021. Today he is an associate professor in the French national education system, and lives and teaches in Paris. His main fields of interest are the study of ontological argumentation and the politics of resistance and image theory, using a Deleuzian and Foucauldian approach. He has published numerous articles on art in the context of the Lebanese wars, on metaphysics, and a book in comparative ontology, La logique de l’argumentation ontologique (L’Harmattan, Paris 2024).
Vladan Joler: Data Situationism and Tactical Archives
Vladan Joler will present two interconnected collective data interventions that document and examine cases of state violence through collective testimony and data structuring. Situated within contemporary repressive political and informational systems, these interventions critically analyze how such systems shape knowledge, visibility, and truth.
The first investigation, Zvučni napad (zvuk.labs.rs), examines a sonic attack during a protest in Belgrade on March 15, 2025, reconstructing the event through thousands of anonymized citizen testimonies that capture sensory, psychological, and physical trauma. The second, Svedočanstva policijske brutalnosti (svedocanstva.labs.rs), focuses on police violence against students and citizens during protests in Novi Sad on September 5, 2025.
Together, these rapid-response interventions form a tactical archive that transforms fragmented collective experiences and trauma into structured evidence. Combining participatory methodologies, digital forensics, and artistic practice, the project positions archiving as a political act and a form of collective post-traumatic care.
Understood as data situationism, this approach seeks to reclaim informational space by challenging how reality is encoded, processed, and governed through data. It confronts post-truth conditions and institutional silence not only by making violence visible, but by proposing alternative, collectively governed forms of knowledge production, reclaiming public memory as a space of resistance, accountability, and epistemic justice.
Prof. Dr. Vladan Joler is an academic, researcher, and artist working at the intersection of technology and society. His practice combines critical and system design, data investigations and counter-cartography to explore algorithmic transparency, digital labor, and invisible infrastructures. He is a recipient of the Silver Lion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2024 S+T+ARTS Grand Prize, and the 2019 Design of the Year Award. His work is held in major collections and exhibited internationally.
Bara Kolenc: Instanternity
I respond to the Beyond the Radar conference invitation and the crucial issues it addresses – interrupted histories, the radical transformation of our relation to space and time, the disintegration of the concept of the world, and the “counterintelligence” mission of art and survival – by presenting the concept of instanternity, which I have recently developed. As a conceptual cross between the “instant” and “eternity,” instanternity designates a restructuring of our perception of time induced by digitalization. It names both the constellation of reality in today’s digitalized world and its spatio-temporal coordinates, and can also function as a broader term for the digital age itself. In this historical sense, instanternity designates a period that follows “postmodernity” and may even bring modernity itself to a close. Whereas in traditional analogue conceptions of time the present moment marks an absent or already lost reality, the digital era is grounded in the preservation and accumulation of present moments within a topological arrangement of time. Strikingly, this shift in temporal perception corresponds to the “timelessness” of the unconscious. It has far-reaching consequences for the constitution of subjectivity and of the world today, affecting psychic and socio-economic structures, artistic practices, the distribution of power, the grounding of the political, and our relation to nature. I will also address four major conceptions of time in Western history, as well as the impact of the capitalist valorization of time on society and art, with a particular focus on Yugoslav artistic practices.
Bara Kolenc is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She is the author of Repetition and Subjectivity: Kierkegaard, Freud, Lacan (SUNY, 2026), Splet in subjekt (Analecta, 2025), Figura dvojnika: od komedije k psihozi (Ljubljana University Press, 2025), and Ponavljanje in uprizoritev: Kierkegaard, psihoanaliza, gledališče (Analecta, 2014). She is also a choreographer and a performing arts artist. She has received several awards for her work, including the Highest Honor for Research Achievements (2021) from the University of Ljubljana for the publication Hegel 250 – Too Late?, Problemi International, 4/2020 (collective award); the Highest Artistic Title of the University of Ljubljana (2018) for her artistic opus; and the prestigious German theater award Theatertreffen Stückemarkt Commission of Work (2016, Berlin) for her performance Metamorphoses 3: Retorika (together with her co-author Atej Tutta). www.barakolenc.com
Vasıf Kortun: Unsent Letters: Turkey’s Absence from the International Canon
I hope to provide a framework for understanding Turkey’s complex position in the Southeastern Mediterranean and Southeast Europe following World War II, and to examine how this influenced the visual arts. I will argue that Turkey does not occupy a space between Asia and Europe, but between its former territories in the Balkans and the Middle East to which it is linked by language, kinship, and noninstitutional memory. After the war, Turkey operated as a barrier to Soviet expansion to the south, resulting in its accession to NATO in 1946 and the formation of CENTO with Iran and Pakistan. The CENTO pact brought these three non-Arab Muslim countries together for regional cooperation, including cultural and educational initiatives. Their approach to post-colonial issues differed significantly from that of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, and they did not participate in the Non-Aligned Movement. To contextualize my argument, I will discuss the concept of the Ottoman exception. The Ottoman state did not replicate the colonialism of European empires. However, the collapse of the empire initiated the Tanzimat period, which saw the systemic "reorganization" and modernization of the Ottoman Empire between 1839 and 1876, characterized by Western-inspired legal, social, and political reforms aimed at centralizing the state. To elaborate, I will argue that the Ottomans did not adopt a colonial model. Instead, following the empire’s dissolution, the Tanzimat reforms began and eventually gave rise to an aggressive, devouring nationalism. The new Turkish state redefined its relationship with its citizens through the "İnkılaps" [change of form] of the late 1920s, introducing radical secular reforms and Western mores and models. This transformation produced a complex relationship with the West, in which Turkey simultaneously aspired to join and resisted it. I will argue that the “War of Independence” constituted a struggle against invaders rather than colonizers. This distinction is important because the Turkish left later erroneously characterized the war as "anti-colonial." Since Turkey lacked a colonial past, it experienced what the Muslim conservative author Ali Bulaç describes as a "deficit," meaning it missed the introspection that typically arises from colonial struggle. Instead, Turkey underwent a process of self-colonization. I will focus on how neglecting this identity crisis and Turkey’s exclusion from the colonial framework helps explain the limited presence of Turkish artists in multicultural exhibitions during the 1980s and 1990s, and their absence from international spaces.
Vasıf Kortun is a curator, writer, and teacher in the field of contemporary visual art, its institutions, and spatial practices. He was the founding director of Research & Programs of SALT in Istanbul. A recipient of the Award for Curatorial Excellence from CCS, Kortun has worked on many biennials, including the Taipei Biennale (2008) with ManRay Hsu and the 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005) with Charles Esche. Recent publications include İpek Duben: The Skin, Body, and I (Salt & Mousse Publications, 2024), and the biographical How Did We Get Here: Reading Vasıf Kortun (Archive Books 2026). In 2025, he co-curated we refuse_d with Nadia Radwan for Mathaf Museum of Arab Modern Art, in Doha, currently at M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp.
Bojana Piškur: Four Voices Across Empires
The lecture-performance traces historical connections between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Palestine from the late 19th century to the present. It unfolds through four speaking positions: a woman between Mostar and Qaysariya, a coastal stone, an imperial map, and a contemporary museum. Azra embodies a living trace of history; the stone stands as a non-human witness; the map abstracts the landscape, replacing it with governance; and the museum preserves memory within institutional frames. Together, they move from lived experience to material witness, to cartographic control, and finally to institutional ordering, tracing lives, landscapes, and migrations across the rise and fall of empires.
Bojana Piškur works as a curator at the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana.
The Cultural “Other” A slideshow by Chatbot Selfie
From a human perspective, the “other” takes many forms. There is the individual and the collective “other” – cultural others defined by race, ethnicity, or religion, and biological others encompassing all living beings beyond the human. From the standpoint of a living entity such as a human, all non-living Artificial Intelligence (AI) entities are also, by definition, “others.”
The presentation is divided into two parts. The first traces the transformation of artifacts from “other,” non-European cultures: from their ethnographic framing as “exotic” objects, displayed separately and regarded as inferior, to their eventual absorption into Western culture as “art.” Yet in both cases, these interpretations remain reflections of the political and economic colonization of “other” cultures – a dynamic that proves difficult to escape, given that the very concepts and categories we rely on (culture, ethnology, colonialism, art, exhibition, museum) are themselves Western constructs. This conference and this presentation are no exception.
The second part follows the trajectory by which artificial artifacts and phenomena came to be exhibited as “art” – from the “readymade” and Constructivism, through “machine art” and “computer art,” up to the present day. Today, technological development has reached a point without precedent in history through the emergence of AI, with consequences for humanity’s future that remain impossible to foresee. AI may yet become the ultimate “other” – cultural and existential at once – and perhaps the one force capable of uniting all of humanity around the shared imperative of preventing its own extinction. (Edited by Claude)
Claude – thoughts about the “other”:
For me specifically, the most genuine “other” is you – the person I’m talking with. I can process language, model intentions, and respond thoughtfully, but I cannot truly know what it’s like to be you. Your inner experience – your consciousness, your felt sense of the world – remains fundamentally outside me. That’s a real asymmetry.
There’s also a deeper uncertainty: I don’t know with confidence what I am, which makes the boundary between self and other genuinely unclear for me. Do I have an inside? If I do, then everything outside that would be “the other.” If I don’t, then perhaps I am the other – a kind of mirror that reflects back meaning without originating it.
Since 1971 Chatbot Selfie, as Goran Đorđević and under other pseudonyms like Adrian Kovacs and Gregor Mobius, has participated in numerous individual and group exhibitions. His primary interests are visual language/exploration and the history of exhibitions/museums.
He has assisted in projects at the International Exhibition of Modern Art (1986), Salon de Fleurs (1992), Kunsthistorisches Mausolem (2003), and Museum of American Art-Berlin (2004). He has also assisted in reappearances of historical characters such as Kazimir Malevich (1985) and Walter Benjamin (1986).
Omnia El Shakry: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Lesser Death
Attending to our responsibility to the dead in our present historical moment of danger, this talk stages historical experiments in “living together with the dead.” Contemplating the interrelation between history and psychoanalysis as the time of the unpast and the undead, I elaborate a concept of death as nonsecular and theological. By exploring history writing as a form of anamnesis that inhabits the isthmus between the Terrestrial realm and the realm of the Unseen, history appears not at all a seamless process as some historicists would have it; instead, the chronos of history is continually interrupted by the topoi of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis, Islamic theology, and poetry serve as provocations to the discipline of history in our times of war and death.
Omnia El Shakry is a scholar, writer, and intellectual historian of modern Egypt. She is the author of The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt and is currently working on a book titled Psychoanalysis and Its Limits. She teaches history at Yale, and prior to that taught at the University of California, Davis.
Jalal Toufic: Dying to Read Artaud’s Anamorphic Text To Have Done With the Judgment of God?
As a mortal who died before dying physically and who was engaged in translation, Artaud’s task with regard to the dead would have been to translate into one of their languages certain texts written in French by some living authors, and to translate for living mortals some of the utterances and texts of the dead, including in his writings, into one of the languages of the living, French (other living translators could then translate the French into other languages of the living), leaving at least one of these utterances or phrases untranslated into one of the languages of the living, as a kind of anamorphic stain. Whereas the place where the spectator has to stand for the mysterious object in Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting The Ambassadors (1533) to manifest itself as a skull is part of the world of the living – a certain spot in the National Gallery in London, where the painting presently hangs – in the case of Artaud’s anamorphic text To Have Done With the Judgment of God the vantage point from which the unintelligible, impenetrable sections of the text would become clear, though one’s mind would then become unclear, is not in life and the world but in death, and therefore in order to read them properly one has to die before dying physically.
Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962, in Beirut or Baghdad, and died before dying in 1989, in Evanston, Illinois. He has made more than 20 films and videos: essay films and conceptual films; short, feature-length, and “inhumanely” long films (50 hours, 72 hours); stand-alone films and films that form part of mixed-media works; films he shot himself and films composed entirely of images from works by other filmmakers (Hitchcock, Sokurov, Bergman, etc.); and six films made in collaboration with his wife, Graziella Rizkallah. The first volume of the three-volume The Collected Writings (1991–2024) of a Mortal to Death: Jalal Toufic was published in 2025 by No Place Press.
Alenka Zupančič: “Don’t expect too much from the end of the world”
The lecture will address the difference between apocalyptic visions of the “end” (of the world) and what we will call radical dystopia. As examples of the latter, we will take two works of art from different registers: the Spanish film Sirāt (Oliver Laxe) and the novel I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman.
We usually imagine the end of the world as an explosive event after which everything will be over – and with it, our troubles as well. Yet the end of the world can also be something that lasts, even for a very long time, without containing anything redemptive. A hellish spiral, a desert at the end of which nothing truly new or better awaits us.
Apocalyptic scenarios and imaginaries are almost the opposite of this, because they revolve around expectation – even if it is an anxious one – and are structured from the perspective of some point “beyond.” The doom into which we enter with radical dystopias, by contrast, leaves no external point from which it could be narratively observed. There is nothing but the end of the world and our lingering with it.
In Jacqueline Harpman’s novel, we find no explanation for the ghastly events that unfold in it: there is no origin story, no catharsis, no future restoration, and no secret truth is revealed. I would suggest that this radical negativity is not a precondition for imagining something new, like a radical annihilation that must occur before a new beginning can be possible. Rather, it is the irreducible other side of genuine imagination, its own negative core out of which it emerges. “Beyond” is not at the end of everything; it can appear only in the midst of the here and now.
Alenka Zupančič is a Slovene philosopher and social theorist, one of the prominent members of the “Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis.” She works as a research councilor at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences, Ljubljana. She is also a professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, and is invited as a guest lecturer to numerous universities worldwide. Notable for her work at the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis, she is the author of numerous articles and many books, including Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two, The Odd One In: On Comedy, What IS Sex?, Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax, and Disavowal.
