Continental Philosophy Research Group Talk (Bara Kolenc, Ljubljana)

The Continental Philosophy Research Group is pleased to welcome as guest speaker Bara Kolenc, a research associate at the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She is affiliated with the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis and currently serves as the president of the International Hegelian Association Aufhebung. Her works include Repetition and Enactment (DTP Analecta 2014, in Slovenian) and the forthcoming Repetition and Subjectivity: Kierkegaard, Freud, Lacan. Currently, she is at work on her new book The Spectacle of Instanternity: Voyeurism and Exhibitionism on the Internet.

Talk Title

The Reciprocal Alienation of the Spectacle of Instanternity: Debord, Lacan, and the Internet

Talk Abstract

From the moment of the emergence of the digital, the actual world cannot be separated from its determinate negation as the non-digital. In the digital age, the pre-digital turns into a myth. At the same time, in its striving to take supremacy over the actual physical existence as something that needs to be sublated (say, with multi-sensory technologies), the digital virtual can only exist in relation to the non-digital actual. Only in this sense – and not in the sense of a nostalgic idealization of “real life” as some primordial harmonic relation between the individual and the world, which has allegedly become lost forever throughout the industrial and post-industrial processes of alienation – should we understand Debord’s statement that the spectacle is a “visible negation of life.” I have coined the notion of “instanternity” to give a name to the emerging spectacle of the Internet. I will explain the choice of this name during my presentation. What I want to pursue in this lecture, however, are the shifts, the minimal structural and phenomenal leaps triggered by the outspread of the digital virtual, which, even if they might not be immediately recognizable as the “break” with reality as it was (before digitalization), they nevertheless break with reality as it was. Specifically, I will focus on the effects of digital transformation on the constitution of subjectivity within the visual realm – drawing on Lacan’s theories of the mirror stage and the scopic drive.

About the Continental Philosophy Group

One of six departmental research interest groups, the Continental Philosophy Group works in the traditions of textual interpretation of human consciousness, phenomenology, and post-structuralist critical theory, among other related traditions of thought.