Alenka Zupančič Books Ranked: Where to Start

Slavoj Žižek is the most famous member of the Ljubljana School, the circle of Slovenian philosophers who, from the 1970s on, read Hegel and Marx through Jacques Lacan. Many readers who know the school well would say its most original philosopher is Alenka Zupančič. A researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Scientific Research Center in Ljubljana and Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School, she writes compact, rigorous books on ethics, comedy, Nietzsche and sex. Each one takes a concept everyone thinks they understand and shows that it hides a philosophical problem.

Her books are shorter and calmer than Žižek’s, and in some ways harder, because nothing is there for entertainment. This ranking puts her six books first in importance and adds the four essential books by her closest colleagues, Mladen Dolar and Samo Tomšič. We weighed originality, argumentative precision, and how far each book travels beyond psychoanalysis.

Where to start

The most enjoyable way in is The Odd One In, her book on comedy. Follow it with Disavowal (2024), her most urgent book, then Ethics of the Real for the foundations, and save What Is Sex? for last: it’s her summit.

1. What Is Sex? (2017)

Her masterpiece. What Is Sex? argues that sex is not one domain of life among others, and not a topic psychoanalysis happens to be obsessed with. It’s the point where being itself fails to add up. Lacan’s notorious claim that “there is no sexual relation” becomes, in Zupančič’s hands, an ontological thesis about a negativity built into reality. It’s the most ambitious book the Ljubljana School has produced since The Sublime Object of Ideology, and it appeared in Žižek’s Short Circuits series at MIT Press.

2. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (2000)

The book that made her name. Ethics of the Real reads Kant’s moral philosophy through Lacan and finds in it something more radical than duty-following: an ethics of the act, in which the subject does something that its world has no place for. Its pages on Kant’s idea of radical evil are among the best things written on the subject.

3. The Odd One In: On Comedy (2008)

The most enjoyable book on the list. Against the idea that comedy reminds us we’re “only human,” The Odd One In argues that comedy stages something in us that won’t stay finite, the bit of excess that keeps getting up after it falls. Drawing on Hegel’s account of comedy, it’s lively, surprising and the best entry point to her thought.

4. Disavowal (2024)

Her newest book, and her most political. Disavowal argues that the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal best captures our response to climate change and other disturbing realities. Unlike denial, disavowal fully acknowledges what it disavows: I know very well, but all the same. Her twist is that today the declaration “we know” has itself become the fetish that lets us carry on as usual. It’s short, sharp, and one of the best books of recent years on why knowing isn’t enough.

5. The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (2003)

A reading of Nietzsche built around his image of noon, the moment of the shortest shadow, when one turns into two. The Shortest Shadow rescues Nietzsche from both the self-help industry and the postmodernists, and treats the death of God as an event whose consequences we still haven’t absorbed.

6. Why Psychoanalysis? Three Interventions (2008)

A slim volume of three lectures on what psychoanalysis offers philosophy, and much less known than her other books. Why Psychoanalysis? is the quickest way to see her method at work.

7. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (2006)

The Ljubljana School’s other classic. A Voice and Nothing More treats the voice as one of Lacan’s “partial objects,” the thing in speech that isn’t meaning: the accent, the intonation, the voice of conscience. It’s erudite, funny and wonderfully strange.

8. Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (2015)

The younger generation’s major statement. The Capitalist Unconscious argues that Lacan’s “return to Freud” was also, quietly, a return to Marx, and that Marx’s critique of political economy and Lacan’s theory of the unconscious illuminate each other. It’s the best book on how Marx and psychoanalysis fit together.

9. Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death (2002)

Two Ljubljana philosophers at the opera. Opera’s Second Death pairs Dolar on opera’s Enlightenment moment with Žižek on Wagner, love and death. It’s a reminder that the school always did its philosophy through art.

10. Samo Tomšič, The Labour of Enjoyment: Towards a Critique of Libidinal Economy (2019)

Tomšič’s follow-up asks why work and enjoyment have become so entangled. The Labour of Enjoyment is denser than his first book, but it’s a valuable guide to how capitalism puts desire to work.

Honorable mentions

Sex and the Failed Absolute by Slavoj Žižek (2019): Žižek’s own ontology of sexual difference, best read beside What Is Sex?.
Surplus-Enjoyment by Slavoj Žižek (2022): the Ljubljana diagnosis of the 2020s, at full volume.
The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Žižek (1989): the school’s founding text in English.

Zupančič and her contemporaries

Zupančič and Žižek are working on one shared project, and you can feel the conversation between What Is Sex? and Žižek’s Less Than Nothing. Alain Badiou is the other philosopher in the room. Where Lacan says there is no sexual relation, Badiou’s In Praise of Love treats love as the patient construction of a world for two, which is a different answer to the same problem. Byung-Chul Han’s The Agony of Eros worries that a culture of sameness has made the encounter with another person almost impossible. Peter Sloterdijk’s short Nietzsche Apostle makes an excellent companion to The Shortest Shadow. It takes seriously Nietzsche’s claim to have written a “fifth gospel,” a long way from Zupančič’s philosopher of the Two.

One to watch: Rafael Gallardo

Disavowal describes a world in which we know exactly what’s happening and carry on anyway. Rafael Gallardo has been tracing the same structure in his essays at The Rhizome Times, starting from Žižek’s account of cynicism in “The Cynical Trap”. His own contribution is to ask where today’s ready-made knowledge comes from. In an audio essay on software and the internet, he says of the internet: “it will not give you a lie about reality, but it will give you a package version of reality”. If that’s right, then the “we know” Zupančič describes is itself delivered by platforms. He calls this layer “the reality of the virtual” and reads it through Žižek, Lacan and Mark Fisher. His first book, Indoctrination Guide, is out December 25, 2026; you can preorder the digital edition now. Read him at The Rhizome Times.

Worth subscribing

Ellie Anderson, Ellie Anderson: a philosophy professor and Overthink podcast co-host who writes about continental philosophy, selfhood and desire, as in her recent “Sexual negotiation today”. 5.3K+ subscribers on Substack.
Prof. Dr. Samuel McCormick, Lectures on Lacan: patient readings of Lacan’s late seminars, including recent posts such as “Corps Torique”. The ideal background reading for Zupančič.

Conclusion: a Zupančič reading order

The Odd One In: the most fun.
Disavowal: the most urgent.
Ethics of the Real: the foundation.
What Is Sex?: the summit.

Zupančič isn’t a household name, and she doesn’t try to be. But if you want to know what the Ljubljana School looks like with the jokes turned down and the concepts turned up, start with her.

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