Mladen Dolar and Andrew Benjamin: On Modernity and Postmodernity

12.09.2018

A conversation, Wednesday, 12 September 2018, 6 pm, Faculty of Architecture (Plečnik's lecture room), Zoisova Street 12, Ljubljana

In the opening part of the conversation, two philosophers and colleagues – Mladen Dolar and Andrew Benjamin – will trace the implications of abstraction for modernity, present both in art and in architecture. Their conversation will also focus on repetition and deconstruction, as among the key solutions that postmodernity proposed for fighting back the incision of modernity. In the concluding part, they will deliberate how those concepts are influencing our contemporary times, in order to understand the futures that space, art and architecture are facing today.

The conversation (in English) is organised as a pre-event to the symposium On Power in Architecture #2, 13 September, 10:00–16:00, MAO, Ljubljana.


Andrew Benjamin is a professor of philosophy and humanities at Kingston University in London. For the last 14 years, he has taught at the University of Technology in Sydney were he currently holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Architectural Theory. Prior to that he taught for almost 20 years at the AA in London. His publications which touch on architecture, art history and philosophy include: Architectural Philosophy (Continuum, 2001), Style and Time (North Western University Press, 2006), Writing Art and Architecture (Re:press Books, 2010), Architectural Projections (RMIT Press, 2012), Art’s Philosophical Work (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2015). He is currently working with Gerard Reinmuth in an ongoing studio investigation of relational architecture.

Mladen Dolar is Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. His principal areas of research are psychoanalysis, modern French philosophy, German idealism and art theory. Apart from a dozen books in Slovene and some hundred papers in English in journals and collected volumes his book publications include most notably A Voice and Nothing More (MIT 2006, translated into six languages) and Opera’s Second Death (with Slavoj Žižek, Routledge 2001, also translated into several languages). He is one of the founders of the so called Ljubljana Lacanian School. His new book The Riskiest Moment is forthcoming with Duke University Press.


Organised by: Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory in collaboration with the Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana
Supported by: ERSTE Foundation

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