Ozren Pupovac

Vita

Ozren Pupovac studied sociology at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb (B.A. 2001), and the Central European University in Warsaw (M.A. 2002). He obtained a PhD in 2008 from the Open University, UK, with a dissertation entitled "Post-Marxism and Post-Socialism: A theoretical and historical critique". From 2005 to 2006 he was a member of the editorial board of "Prelom", a Belgrade based journal crossing the fields of theory, politics and contemporary art. In 2006 and 2007 he worked as a research consultant for the Open University on the development of a political theory course DD306 - "Living Political Ideas". From January 2007 to December 2008 he worked a researcher at the Theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. His research areas include contemporary French philosophy, Marxist social and political theory, theories of the nation-state, and the history and politics of socialism.

ICI-Project

Versus Laboratory: Dissensual Relations are Points of Thought/Politics and Thought
Abstract: Versus Laboratory, set as a collaboration between Bruno Besana and Ozren Pupovac, explores how philosophical concepts are produced at the points of adversity and tension with the philosophical exterior, namely, political, aesthetical and scientific practices. We approach philosophy not as a regulative practice that reflects upon other practices and defines their fields of action, but as a battlefield whose interiority is fed by the dissensual relations that it maintains with other practices. During 2008 and 2009, Versus Laboratory will run a monthly seminar at the ICI exploring how the conceptual couple "Plus/Minus" is expressed in the notions of subtraction and excess. My individual project "Politics and Thought" seeks to track the effects of the displacement of the proper spaces of thinking and acting between philosophy and politics, researching the specific dimension of thought in political practice, and the specific dimension of action in philosophical theory.

Publications

ARTICLES (SELECTION):

•  ‘Laclau i Mouffe, post-marksizam, post-socijalizam’, in: Up and Underground (Special issue following the ‘Subversive Film Festival’), Zagreb: May 2008
•  ‘Nothing took place but the place: Đinđić and Yugoslavia’. In: Ljubljana, Borec, special issue, Summer, 2008.
•  ‘Prelom in prelomi preloma’ (‘The Break and the breaks of the Break’). In: Agregat, 8/9, 2007, Ljubljana.
•  ‘Project Yugoslavia: Dialectics of the Revolution’, Prelom; No. 8, Belgrade: Prelom Kolektiv, 2006.
•  ‘Springtime for Hegemony: Laclau and Mouffe with Janez Janša’, Prelom; No. 8,  Belgrade: Prelom Kolektiv, 2006.
•  ‘Na marginama Evrope: Intervju sa Rastkom Močnikom’ (On the Margins of Europe: Interview with Rastko Močnik), (2005) in: Prelom, No. 6/7, Belgrade: Prelom Kolektiv.
• "Arbitrariness of the Signifier? The construction of peoplehood in the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia" (2004), in: Craig, Garry (ed.) "Race" and Social Research: five case studies, Working Papers in Social Sciences and Policy, University of Hull. (Slovene translation of an edited version of this text appeared in: Agregat: Journal for contemporary sociopolitical polemics, No. 6-7, June 2005).
• "The Unconscious of Democracy: Ideological hegemony and nationalism in post-socialist Croatia" (2004), in: Domains: The Journal for the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, No. 1, Vol. 1. New York: South Focus Press.
• “Tactical Media: Radicalisms of the Information Age” (2001) in: Diskrepancija, No. 2, pg. 33-42, Zagreb: KSSD.

TRANSLATIONS (BOOKS):

•  Badiou, Alain Mračni raspad (Croato-Serbian translation, together with Ivana Momčilović, of D’un desastre obscur, Editions de l'Aube), Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, Bastard/Arkzin Editions, Zagreb (forthcoming 2009).
• Badiou, Alain Stoljeće (Croatian translation of Le siecle, Paris: Seuil), Antibarbarus Editions, Zagreb (forthcoming 2008).

DOCUMENTARY AND AUDIOVISUAL PRODUCTIONS:

Case studies: ‘The break-up of Yugoslavia’ and ‘The Battle of Algiers’. (Production of AV and textual materials, with Dr. Jef Huysmans). In: Political theory course DD306. Living Political Ideas. The Open University. (forthcoming 2008-2009)

Extended Project Description

VERSUS LABORATORY: Dissensual Relations are Points of Thought (collective project with Bruno Besana):

Set as a collaboration between Bruno Besana and Ozren Pupovac, Versus Laboratory is a theoretical laboratory – practised in the guise of research seminars, conferences and publications – which seeks to examine, and experiment upon, some of the most pertinent moments of the polemical genesis of thought in contemporary philosophical practice. Our aim is to explore how philosophy shapes and transforms its interiority – the production of concepts – at the points of adversity and tension with its exteriority, at the points of intrusion of political, aesthetical, scientific and more widely extraphilosophical acts and discourses. We thus approach philosophy not as a regulative practice that reflects upon other practices and defines their fields of action, but as a battlefield whose interiority is fed by the dissensual relations with other practices, and whose internal dissensual activity can in return feed other practices. Dissensual tensions are productive procedures that generate thought, and which reconnect philosophical thought to other practices.

During our monthly seminar at the ICI, we will work upon the conceptual couple “plus/minus” (which we specify via the concepts of excess and subtraction). In this we approach the problems of dissent and tension not only as a methodological angle of inquiry, but also as an object.

In the first moment we will try to understand how the concepts of “subtraction” and “excess” are shaped at specific points where philosophy is confronted with shocks coming from its exterior: from politics, psychoanalysis, the sciences and art. What philosophy captures, at its own edges, from such practices are singular points of tension which condense the contradictions of a situation. The specificity of such points of tension is that they are essentially in excess both over the situation they belong to and over the definition that philosophy can offer of them. The problem then is how these points of excess can be philosophically identified via practices of subtraction, the aim of which is to dispense with the received structures of interpretation. Alain Badiou, Louis Althusser, Sylvan Lazarus, Jacques Rancière will be some of the names that we will encounter during this trajectory.

In the second moment, we will displace our inquiry from the points of contact between philosophy and other practices to one of the central nuclei of philosophy, ontology. Our aim here is to see how the conceptual coupe excess/subtraction is active in the ontologies that do not separate essence from accidents. As long as we grasp being as a stable essence to which attributes only enhance or diminish the range of appearance, we affirm that each variation – and therefore each tension that produces variations – is not essential, but only phenomenical. On the contrary, if we consider that tensions, the lessening and the increasing of a given object, are fully real, then we cannot separate these from the definition of what an essence is. Accidents become essential, tension becomes the defining character of each singular being. This is the guiding thread through which we seek to approach philosophical moments such as the couple being/event in Badiou, Deleuze’s relation to Greek stoicism, but also Ray Brassier’s attempt to affirm a radical ontological nihilism.

The work accomplished in the seminar around these two moments will be used as framework to set out an international conference and a collective publication.

POLITICS AND THOUGHT (INDIVIDUAL PROJECT)

My individual project aims to examine further one of the dissensual relations that are enveloped in the collective research pattern: the relationship between philosophy and politics.

The specific angle of the analysis that I propose is built upon two propositions: a) that philosophy and politics, pace 'historicism' or 'ideologism', are irreducible to each other. b) that the separation between thinking and acting, does not render this irreducibility intelligible.

The question, in fact, is precisely to understand how politics thinks - how political practice shapes and generates an irreducible form of thought; and, conversely, how philosophy acts - how the labour of the concept possesses an irreducible practical dimension of its own.

I approach this double displacement through two specific, albeit inseparable moments:

1) by seizing specific instances of thought in politics - via the likes of Machiavelli, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Lenin, Mao, Tito, and other - instances where the necessity of acting in the here and now produces an original form of thinking which goes beyond the coordinates of the 'possible'.

2) by analysing different propositions of the practicality of philosophy, standing under the injunction to 'change the world' (e.g. ideas of subtraction and compossibility in Badiou; the notions of demarcation and mediation in Althusser; the concept of critique (of ideology) in Marx).