Historical Background
The school was founded in the late 1970s by young Slovenian followers of the theories of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, in what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Founding members of the school included Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar and Rastko Močnik. Their main aim was to bring together the philosophy of German idealism, Marxism and psychoanalytic theories as a means of analysis of contemporary social, cultural and political phenomena. The school rose to prominence in the international academic environment in the 1990s.
The group was formed around a young generation of Marxist students at the University of Ljubljana, in Socialist Slovenia. Contrary to their older colleagues, affiliated with the Praxis school, these young students rejected Marxist humanism and turned towards the "antihumanism" of the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and, to a lesser extent, to the Frankfurt School.
The main goal of the Ljubljana School was to re-interpret Marxism by emphasizing the rootedness of Karl Marx's thought in the tradition of German idealism. They favoured an anti-historicist interpretation of Hegel's philosophy, with an emphasis on his epistemology and dialectic philosophy. Most of the members of the Ljubljana school have been indebted to the Slovenian Marxist Božidar Debenjak, professor of philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, renowned for his attentive reading of German idealism, who introduced the Frankfurt School in Slovenia.
A specific feature of the Ljubljana School was to connect the Marxist and Hegelian traditions with Lacanian psychoanalysis and with Structuralism. The combined reading of Lacan, German idealism (especially Hegel), Marx, the Frankfurt school and authors from the structuralist tradition, especially Claude Lévi-Strauss, has since been the distinctive feature of the Ljubljana School.
Read more about this topic: Ljubljana School Of Psychoanalysis
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