The article analyses two concepts, or conceptual operations, coming from very different traditions and contexts. One is Freud’s concept of Verneinung, “Negation”, developed in his short yet extraordinary piece bearing this title, and the other is the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung, “sublation”, described by him as “one of the most important notions in philosophy”. The methodological approach consists in proposing a parallel reading of the two conceptual operations, against the background of which come to light some of the singular, less obvious, yet absolutely crucial aspects of these two concepts, as well as of the broader theoretical settings within which they appear. The principal thesis of the article concerns the singular nature of double negation at work in both concepts: its ability to produce something new, a singular object that does not exist outside this operation.
COBISS.SI-ID: 38139437
The paper shows that – through its artistic treating of madness and folly – the North European Renaissance developed an entirely new type of certainty, which can be associated with neither ontological argument nor empirical knowledge. The thesis of the paper is that this type of certainty already involves the key features of what Žižek names the »hidden obverse« of the Cartesian cogito. Thus it sheds an entirely new light on one of the crucial chapters in history of philosophy.
COBISS.SI-ID: 38146605
In the first part, the contribution examines some of the basic theses of Freudian mass psychology. This theoretical framework then provides the perspective through which we consider three empirical cases of group formations that have marked the Slovenian political situation in the last few years: the protestors, the persisters, and the voters. We argue that, despite their differences, all three types of groups are forms of a collective subject as a subject of thought, and so the realisation of, as Freud would say, a group’s capability of “creative genius in the field of intelligence”.
COBISS.SI-ID: 38147117