[PHILOS-L] PRISM Talk Series | 06 | Alenka Zupančič – “The Time of Monsters” | Online, 1 Oct 2025

[Seraphin Frimmer]

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Dear colleagues,

Join us on 1 October 2025 at 7:00 p.m. CEST (UTC+02:00) for Prof. Alenka Zupančič’s online lecture, “The Time of Monsters: Crisis, Subjectivity, and Struggle Today,” the sixth installment in the PRISM Talk Series — Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries on Society and Mind.

Prof. Dr. Alenka Zupančič is a Research Advisor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) and a leading voice of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. Her work brings Lacanian theory into dialogue with thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kant, and Hegel to rethink questions of ethics, sexuality, and ontology. Her key books include The Shortest Shadow (2003), The Odd One In (2008), and What IS Sex? (2017). Her latest monograph, Disavowal (2024), examines the dynamics of denial and contradiction in contemporary political crises.

Her talk takes Antonio Gramsci’s famous remark, “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters,” as its point of departure to address today’s climate of serial crises. Global health emergencies, geopolitical conflicts, and economic turmoil — each unfolding under the long, looming shadow of global warming — accumulate at dizzying speed, while the conceptual coordinates that once helped us navigate uncertainty seem to crumble. Zupančič examines these phenomena (or “monsters”) from philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives, extending lines of thought developed in her book Disavowal (2024). The lecture raises a series of unsettling questions: What if the time of monsters is not a transitional phase at all, but the new world itself? How could we determine that it is not? How can we know whether anything lies — or will lie — on the other side? Ultimately, Zupančič asks about the status and temporality of this “time of monsters” and the kinds of subjectivity and struggle it implies, enables, or forecloses.

To attend, please register free of charge via Pretix here: https://pretix.eu/prismtalkseries/prism-talk-6/c/5nGoRN9He/
After registering via Pretix, you will receive a confirmation e-mail containing a link to complete a Zoom registration. Once that is done, Zoom will send you your personal join link to the event.

Please feel free to forward this announcement to anyone who might be interested.

Recordings of earlier lectures in the PRISM Talk Series can be found on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@PRISMTalkSeries
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With best regards,

Seraphin Frimmer, M.A. (he/him)
Producer & Host, PRISM Talk Series
PhD candidate, Munich School of Philosophy
Series & media inquiries: contact.pri...@gmail.com
Personal contact: seraphin...@gmail.com
Profile: https://mwn.academia.edu/SeraphinFrimmer

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