Framing Issues Related to the Digital Unconscious: Interview with Alenka Zupančič

AZ: My present project focuses on the question of the end, examining different ways in which this theme appears. From the “end of history” to the “end of the world,” passing through the “end of art,” the “end of ideology,” the “end of grand narratives” . . . which do not suggest the same idea at all. Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man actually marks the opposite of what it seems to suggest, namely, that we have finally reached the end. What it marks is, quite the contrary, the impossibility to end. Namely, the impossibility to end capitalism, or the impossibility for capitalism as we know it to come to an end. If capitalist liberal democracy, as [Fukuyama’s] book suggested, constitutes the end of history, this end can last forever, it can go on forever, it is not the end of the world; it is not subjected to historical time but to its own temporality, in which there are no intrinsic reasons for it to end. It is an end that can go on endlessly, forever. The end itself doesn’t end, we just get stuck in a weird immobility. And I claim that if we look at how the political and cultural landscape functions today, perhaps the shortest way of describing it would be to say that Framing Issues Related to the Digital Unconscious: Interview with Alenka Zupančič