A conversation between the psychoanalyst and philosopher Alexander Smulansky, and the co-founder of the project TZVETNIK Natalya Serkova. Topics such as the inadequacy of direct action, the deferral of satisfaction, and the enunciation in the artistic realm were discussed.

These reflections trace the subtle ways in which contemporary intellectual spaces often trade rigorous inquiry for the comfort of repetitive ritual and shared silence. They observe a landscape where the sharp demands of theory are increasingly smoothed over by seductive but hollow substitutes. Ultimately, what emerges is a portrait of a field where the loss of conceptual rigor is replaced by a pervasive atmosphere of moralizing humility.

The intrigue lies in the fact that the language which Heidegger counted on as a means of returning the lost way of thinking about being can easily turn into something monstrous and stubbornly pursuing the subject, and, ironically, this is precisely what we are witnessing. This language is not only already at work; it also occupies a niche where it turns out to be the only option. At first glance, it is represented by raw but simultaneously schematic relations, in which the statement not only requires an object in a certain way, but also strives for a state in which this language underlies what we call “fantasm” today.

Exciting scientific passion in his associates while simultaneously scolding and reproaching them for their inability to sustain the intellectual and conceptual level of the method he discovered, Freud unwittingly plants in the psychoanalytic history and institutions emerging on its grounds something that is subsequently expressed in the displacement of the source of this scolding and incessant criticism to the level of the institutional interaction.

No matter how often various psy-theories, including psychoanalysis, stress the importance of the mother, something is constantly avoided here. Namely, a crucial observation that it is not the maternal but something exclusively feminine in the figure of the mother that fundemantally marks the subject's ogranization. The female phantasm whose frame is not only umlimited to, but does not necessarily include any references to the child — confronts the child with the very concept of desire.

Having the reputation of the most provocative and inaccessible concepts introduced by Lacan, the Real excites the minds not only in the psychoanalytic community but far beyond the psychoanalytic framework. Introducing the Real in connection with the political is a well established tradition in the history of critical thinking, however, this tricky liaison produces numerous fluctuations of both internal and external theoretical character. Therefore, getting back to the most substantial debate concerning the position of the Real could shed some light on the hitherto unnoticed circumstances.

Alexander Smulansky relates the emergence of psychoanalytic discipline with Freud’s desire directed to a particular object that appeared in his office. This object is the speech of the hysteric who was finally invited to talk and to do it freely. Listening to that speech, Freud discovered that the hysteric’s difficulties does not concern only her personal problems but are rather addressed to the function of desire per se.

Pursuing lacanian logic of jouissance as the main discursive operator, psychoanalytic theoretical apparatus elaborated by Alexander Smulansky offers unexpected solutions in what concerns the question of femininity and its crucial importance as a constitutive element of modernity. This article demonstrates the way queer studies diverge from the trajectory of following the fate of contemporary subject and marks a number of theoretic solutions that could allow us to analyze contemporary situation more accurately.

The English translation of the interview that was given by the prominent Russian theorist and psychoanalyst — Alexander Smulansky. In this text, Smulansky presents some of his ingenious elaborations of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Despite a widespread belief in the specific damage of the contemporary subject, the psychoanalytic approach does not reveal any radical transformations in the subject's structure, apart from the perturbations in what could be called the politics of jouissance. Smulansky talks about the discursivity of jouissance beyond the leftist perspective, about the unknown aspects of the desire of the analyst, he introduces publicity as a new gender and reading as a form of sexuation.