You studied philosophy at the University of Liubliana and wrote a doctoral thesis on Heidegger. Why did you choose Heidegger?

Maybe I should just add that while my doctoral thesis is on Heidegger, my first book - published when I was 22 - wasn't my thesis, it was my graduation paper. It was a mixture of Heidegger and Derrida with a very embarrassing title: The Pain of the Difference. It is another of those books which it is better not to mention in my presence! It's an early work, and a pretty confused one. After that, my Master's thesis was on French theories of symbolic practice, covering Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Foucault and others, but its orientation wasn't really clear. It was only with my second doctoral thesis, in the late 1970s, that a clear Lacanian orientation emerged.

But why Heidegger, since we are returning so much to Heidegger? I must say that I am more and more convinced that Heidegger, in spite of all the criticism which he deserves, is the philosopher who connects us in the sense that, in a way, almost every other orientation of any serious weight defines itself through some sort of critical relation or distance towards Heidegger. I meant this in the sense of Foucault, who said somewhere that all philosophy is anti-Platonic (every philosopher has to designate, to mark,-- his or her distance towards Plato), or as in the nineteenth century when it was possible to articulate an anti-Hegelianism, but this meant precisely that: a distance towards Hegel. I think that in our context it is a distance towards Heidegger that is critical.

And it is typical that this distance as a rule takes the form not of an absolute limitation but a kind of ambiguous conditional: you endorse part of it and then you say but Heidegger didn't go far enough. For example, Marxists would have said 'Yes, Being and Time is a great breakthrough, with its abstract theoretical notion of ego as the subject of perception, Dasein, that is engaged or thrown into the world', but they would say that Heidegger had missed the social dimension.

Even, for example, someone like Derrida would have said, 'yes, Heidegger started the critique of metaphysics of presence, but his notion of the event of appropriation is still too closed' Heidegger almost did it, but he didn't go far enough. In this sense I think that Heidegger is in a way a key figure here. To go back to the situation in Slovenia at that point, I think I was lucky in the sense that precisely because Slovenia wasn't a strong international philosophical presence (in other republics, such as Croatia and Serbia, there was, in the guise of this Praxis School of Humanist Marxism, more of an international presence) , there existed representatives of all the other predominant orientations of philosophy. We had the Frankfurt School, Marxists, we had the Heideggerians, we had analytical philosophers and so on. So I was lucky enough to have been exposed to all the predominant orientations.

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¶ 4:08 AM