The Impossible Object of Sex: My talk with Alenka Zupančič

How psychoanalysis reveals the fractures in subjectivity that structure desire, sex, and identity

- BY NILANTHA ILANGAMUWA

(ALENKA ZUPANCIC)

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 Zupan i, 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.