DISTINGUISHED LECTURE: DR. ALENKA ZUPANČIČ END-TIME SUBJECTIVITIES?

We increasingly hear that we are living through the “end of the world” or, more modestly, the end of the world as we have known it. Political leaders, commentators, and intellectuals alike speak of the collapse of the old world order and the need to adapt to a new reality. But what forms of subjectivity correspond to these proclamations? What modes of subjectivation do they presuppose, produce, or foreclose?

Approaching these questions from the perspectives of philosophy and psychoanalysis, this lecture examines some of the dominant subjective responses to the experience of an ending. It also explores how subjectivity and desire may nevertheless emerge in the midst of a nightmarish desert that seems the least hospitable to them. Finally, the lecture considers some of the ways in which contemporary AI technologies participate in processes of subjectivation, reshaping both our experience of agency and our relation to knowledge, desire, and reality.