Rastko Močnik

Rastko Močnik
Rastko Močnik on Subversive Festival
Born	(1944-08-27) 27 August 1944 (age 72) Ljubljana, SR Slovenia

Rastko Močnik (born 27 August 1944) is a Slovenian sociologist, literary theorist, translator and political activist. Together with Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, he is considered one of the co-founders of the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis.

He was born as Josip Rastko Močnik in a middle-class family in Ljubljana. He studied sociology and history of literature at the University of Ljubljana, graduating in 1968 under the supervision of Dušan Pirjevec. During his student years, he was active in several avant-garde literary movements. In 1964, he became the last co-editor (together with the poet Tomaž Šalamun) of the alternative journal Perspektive, before it was closed down by the Communist regime. Between 1968 and 1970 he worked as a journalist at the journal Delo. He later studied at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, where he obtained a PhD in philosophy under the supervision of Algirdas Julien Greimas.

After returning to Ljubljana, he became the editor of the alternative journal Problemi. During this period, he started a close collaboration with Marxist philosophers Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar. Since 1984, Močnik is professor of sociology at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana.

Močnik was among the first Slovene theorists who introduced structuralism and the theories of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in Slovenian academia. He has written on several subjects including theory of ideology, theoretical psychoanalysis, semiotics, linguistics and epistemology of humanities and social sciences. He has also translated works of Jacques Lacan, Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss into Slovene.